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CHARACTER 



AND 



CHARACTERISTIC MEN. 



BY 



EDWIN P; WHIPPLE. 




I«A SALLE &kU%? 

AMMENDAL** 



BOSTON: 

FIELDS, OSGOOD, & OO., 

SUCCESSORS TO TICKNOB AND FIELDS. 

1 8 7 0. 



,NV)5 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by 
TICK NOR AND FIELDS, 
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court pi the District of Massachusetts 




University Press : Welch, Bigelow, & Co., 
Cambridge. 



4o 



TO 

THE MEMORY 

OF 

THOMAS STARR KING, 
W&% Volume 

IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED. 



CONTENTS. 



Pagb 



I. Character . 1 

II. Eccentric Character .... 35 

HI. Intellectual Character ... 66 

IV. Heroic Character .... 96 

Y. The American Mend . .129 

VI. The English Mind . . . . 165 

VII. Thackeray 197 

VIII. Nathaniel Hawthorne . . . 218 

IX. Edward Everett . . . . 243 

X. Thomas Starr King . . . . 253 

XI. Agassiz 266 

Xn. Washington and the Principles of the 

Revolution 293 



PEEFACE. 



The essays in the present volume were writ- 
ten at various times, and without any view to 
their connected publication ; but they all more 
or less illustrate one idea of the nature, growth, 
and influence of character. With the exception 
of those on Thackeray, Hawthorne, and Agassiz, 
they were all originally delivered as lectures or 
addresses, and the style doubtless exhibits that 
perpetual scepticism as to the patience of au- 
diences which torments the lecturer during the 
brief hour in which he attempts to hold their 
attention. The first six of the essays, with the 
exception of that on Intellectual Character, were 
published in Harper's Magazine, between July 
and November, 1857, and the paper on Agassiz 
was also contributed to that periodical. As most 
of the essays were written before the Rebellion, 



vi 



PREFACE. 



some of the opinions expressed in them look an- 
tiquated as seen in the light of recent events. 
This is particularly true of the discourse on the 
American Mind, which is only now reprinted be- 
cause it contains some remarks on national char- 
acter that could not well be omitted. 

Boston, July, 1866. 



I 



CHARACTER. 




T is impossible to cast the most superficial glance 



over the community, without being impresaed by 
the predominance of associated over individual action, 
and of people over persons. Few dare to announce un- 
welcome truth, or even to defend enthusiastic error, 
without being backed by some sect, party, association, 
or clique ; and, thus sustained, the effort is in danger 
of subsiding from a duty into a pleasure or passion. It 
might be supposed that this companionable thinking, — 
this moral or religious power owned in joint stock, — 
would at least operate against egotism and the vices of 
capricious individualism ; but, practically, it is apt to 
result in self-admiration through mutual admiration ; 
to pamper personal pride without always developing a 
personality to be proud of ; and to raise the market 
price of mediocrity by making genius and heroism 
small and cheap. Formerly, to attack a community 
intrenched in laws, customs, institutions, and beliefs, re- 
quired dauntless courage; a soul sublimed by an idea 



l 



A 



2 



CHARACTER. 



above the region of vanity and conceit; a character 
resolutely facing responsibilities it clearly realized ; and 
especially a penetrating vision into the spirit and heart 
of the objects assailed. This last characteristic is in- 
sisted upon by all the authorities. " There is nothing 
so terrible as activity without insight," says Goethe. 
" I would open every one of Argus's hundred eyes be- 
fore I used one of Briareus's hundred hands," says 
Lord Bacon. " Look before you leap," says John 
Smith, all over the world. But it is too much the 
mistake of many hopeful people of our day to consider 
organized institutions, which had their origin in the 
vices or necessities of human nature, to possess no 
authority over the understanding if they happen to 
contradict certain abstract truisms, and a still greater 
mistake to suppose that these institutions will yield to a 
proclamation of opinions or a bombardment of words. 

It being then evident that institutions can be success- 
fully attacked only by forces kindred in nature to those 
by which they were originally organized, the question 
arises, What is it that really forms and reforms insti- 
tutions, communicates life and movement to society, 
and embodies thoughts in substantial facts? The an- 
swer is, in one word, Character ; and this conducts us 
at once beneath the sphere of associated and merely 
mechanical contrivances into the region of personal and 



CHARACTER. 



3 



vital forces. It is character which gives authority to 
opinions, puts virile meaning into words, and burns its 
way through impediments insurmountable to the large 
in brain who are weak in heart ; for character indicates 
the degree in which a man possesses creative spiritual 
energy ; is the exact measure of his real ability ; is, in 
short, the expression, and the only expression, of the 
man, — the person. His understanding and sensibility 
may play with thoughts and coquet with sentiments, 
and his conscience flirt with beautiful ideals of good- 
ness, and this amateur trifling he may call by some fine 
name or other; but it is the centre and heart of his 
being, the source whence spring living ideas and living 
deeds, which ever determines his place when we esti- 
mate him as a power. The great danger of the con- 
servative is his temptation to surrender character and 
trust in habits ; the great danger of the radical is his 
temptation to discard habits without forming character. 
One is liable to mental apathy, the other to mental an- 
archy ; and apathy and anarchy are equally destitute 
of causative force and essential individuality. 

As character is thus the expression of no particular 
quality or faculty, but of a whole nature, it reveals, of 
course, a man's imperfections in revealing his greatness. 
He is nothing unless he acts ; and, as in every vital 
thought and deed character appears, his acts must par 



4 



CHARACTER. 



take of his infirmities, and the mental and moral life 
communicated in them be more or less diseased. As 
he never acts from opinions or propositions, his nature 
cannot be hidden behind such thin disguises, the fatal 
evidence against him being in the deed itself. If there 
be sensuality, or malignity, or misanthropy in him, it 
will come out in his actions, though his tongue drop 
purity and philanthropy in every word. Probably 
more hatred, licentiousness, and essential impiety are 
thus communicated through the phraseology and con- 
tortions of 'their opposites, than in those of vice itself. 
Moral life is no creation of moral phrases. The words 
that are truly vital powers for good or evil are only 
those which, as Pindar says, " the tongue draws up 
from the deep heart." 

Now, as men necessarily communicate themselves 
when they produce from their vital activity, it follows 
that their productions will never square with the ab- 
stract opinions of the understanding, but present a con- 
crete, organic whole, compounded of truth and error, 
evil and good, exactly answering to the natures whence 
they proceed. This actual process of creation we are 
prone to ignore or overlook, and to criticise institutions 
as Pymer and Dennis criticised poems, that is, as 
though they were the manufactures of mental and 
moral machines, working on abstract principles ; where* 



CHARACTER. 



5 



as creation on such a method is impossible, and we are 
compelled to choose between imperfect organisms and 
nothing. That this imperfection is not confined to 
jurists and legislators is sufficiently manifest when 
the vehement and opinionated social critic undertakes 
the work of demolition and reconstruction, and all the 
vices peculiar to his own nature, such as his intolerance 
of facts and disregard of the rights and feelings of oth- 
ers, have an opportunity of displaying themselves. His 
talk is fine, and his theories do him honor ; but when 
he comes to act as a man, when he comes to exhibit 
what he is as well as what he thinks, it is too com- 
monly found that four months of the rule of so-called 
philosophers and philanthropists are enough to make 
common men sigh for their old Bourbons and Bo 
napartes. Robespierre, anarchist and philanthropist, 
Frederick of Prussia, despot and philosopher, were 
both bitter and vitriolic natures, yet both, in their 
youth, exceeded Exeter Hall itself in their professions 
of universal beneficence, and evinced, in their rants, not 
hypocrisy, but self-delusion. Frederick indeed wrote 
early in life a treatise called " The Anti-Machiavel, 
which was," says his biographer, "an edifying homily 
against rapacity, perfidy, arbitrary government, unjust 
war ; in short, against almost everything for wkicli its 
author is now remembered among men," 







CHARACTER. 



Thus to the pride of reason and vanity of opinion 
character interposes its iron limitations, declaring war 
against all forms and modes of pretension, and affording 
the right measure of the wisdom and folly, the right- 
eousness and the wickedness, substantially existing in 
persons and in communities of persons. Let us now 
consider this power in some of the varieties of its man- 
ifestation, observing the law of its growth and influ- 
ence and the conditions of its success. Our purpose 
will rather be to indicate its radical nature than to 
treat of those superficial peculiarities which many deem 
to be its essential elements. 

The question has been often raised, whether charac- 
ter be the creation of circumstances, or circumstances 
the creation of character. Now, to assert that circum- 
stances create character is to eliminate from character 
that vital causative energy which is its essential char- 
acteristic ; and to assert that circumstances are the 
creation of character, is to endow character with the 
power not only to create, but to furnish the materials 
of creation. The result of both processes would not 
be character, but caricature. The truth seems to be, 
that circumstances are the nutriment of character, the 
food which it converts into blood ; and this process of 
assimilation presupposes individual power to act upon 
circumstances. Goethe says, in reference to his own 



CHARACTER. 



7 



mental growth and productiveness, " Every one of my 
writings has been furnished to me by a thousand differ- 
ent persons, a thousand different things. The learned 
and the ignorant, the wise and the foolish, infancy and 
age, have come in turn — generally without the least 
suspicion of it — to bring me the offering of their 
thoughts, their faculties, their experience. Often they 
have sowed the harvest I have reaped. My work is 
that of an aggregate of beings taken from the whole of 
nature ; it bears the name of Goethe." Yes, it bears 
the name of Goethe, because Goethe assimilated all 
this knowledge and all this aggregate of beings into 
Goethe, — broadening, enriching, and deepening his in- 
dividuality, but not annihilating it ; so that his charac- 
ter became as comprehensive as his experience. 

Indeed, in all the departments of life, meditative and 
practical, success thus depends on a thorough knowl- 
edge, proceeding from a complete assimilation, of all 
the circumstances connected with each department, — 
the man standing for the thing, having mastered and, 
as it were, consumed it, so that all its forces are iri 
himself as personal power and personal intelligence. 
The true merchant, the true statesman, the true mili- 
tary commander, the true artist, becomes a man of 
character only when he " puts on," and identifies him- 
self with, his particular profession or art. Balzac 



8 



CHARACTER. 



thought he could not describe a landscape until he had 
turned himself for the moment into trees, and grass, 
and fountains, and stars, and effects of sunlight, and 
thus entered into the heart and life of the objects he 
ached to reproduce. Nelson realized with such inten- 
sity the inmost secrets of his profession, that experience 
and study had in him been converted into intuition, so 
that he could meet unexpected contingencies with in- 
stinctive expedients. If he failed, through lack of 
means, to snatch all the possible results of victory, his 
unrealized conception tortured him more than a sabre 
cut or a shattered limb. At the Battle of the Nile 
many French ships escaped because he had no frigates 
to pursue them. In his despatches he writes : " Should 
I die this moment, 6 want of frigates ' would be found 
written on my heart ! " 

With this view of character as the embodiment of 
things in persons, it is obviously limited in its sphere 
to the facts and laws it has made its own, and out of 
that sphere is comparatively feeble. Thus, many able 
lawyers and generals have been blunderers as states- 
men ; and one always shudders for the health of the 
community when the name of a statesman or clergy- 
man — properly authoritative in his special department 
— is employed to recommend some universal panacea, 
or some aqueous establishment for washing away the 



CHARACTER. 



9 



diseases of the world. Character speaks with author- 
ity only of those matters it has realized, and in respect 
to them its dogmatisms are reasons and its opinions 
are judgments. When Mr. Webster, in attacking a 
legal proposition of an opponent at the bar, was re- 
minded that he was assailing a dictum of Lord Cam- 
den, he turned to the Court, and after paying a tribute 
to Camden's greatness as a jurist, simply added, " But, 
may it please your Honor, / differ from Lord Cam- 
den." It is evident that such self-assertion would have 
been ridiculous had not the character of the man re- 
lieved it from all essential pretension ; but if the case 
had been one of surgery or theology, and Mr. Webster 
had emphasized his " ego 99 in a difference with Sir Ast- 
ley Cooper or Hooker, the intrusion of his " I " would 
have been an impertinence which his reputation as a 
statesman or lawyer could not have shielded from con- 
tempt. Indeed, injustice is often done to the real mer- 
its of eminent men when they get enticed out of their 
strongholds of character, and venture into unaccus- 
tomed fields of exertion, where their incapacity is soon 
detected. Macaulay has vividly shown how Hastings, 
the most vigorous and skilful of English statesmen in 
India, blundered the moment he applied the experience 
he had acquired in Bengal to English politics ; and that 
perfection in one profession does not imply even com- 
1* 



10 



CHARACTER. 



mon judgment outside of it, was painfully demonstrated 
a few years ago, in the case of an accomplished Amer- 
ican general, among whose splendid talents writing 
English does not appear to be one. When, therefore, 
not content to leave his prodigies of strategy and tac- 
tics to speak for themselves, he invaded the domain 
of rhetoric, and crossed pens with Secretary Marcy, 
people began to imagine, as verbs went shrieking about 
after nouns, and relative pronouns could find no rela- 
tions, that the great general had no character at all. 

But confine a characteristic man to the matters he 
has really mastered, and there is in him no blundering, 
no indecision, no uncertainty, but a straightforward, 
decisive activity, sure as insight and rapid as instinct. 
You cannot impose upon him by nonsense of any kind, 
however prettily you may bedizen it in inapplicable 
eloquence. Thus Jeremiah Mason — a man who was 
not so much a lawyer as he was law embodied — was 
once engaged to defend a clergyman accused of a 
capital crime, and was repeatedly bothered by the 
attempts of the brethren to make him substitute theo- 
logical for legal evidence. As he was making out his 
brief, one of these sympathizers with the prisoner 
rushed joyously into the room, with the remark that 

Brother A was certainly innocent, for an angel 

from heaven had appeared to him the night before, and 



CHARACTER. 



11 



had given him direct assurance of the fact. u That is 
very important evidence, indeed," was the gruff reply 
of Mason ; " but can you subpoena that angel ? " The 
anecdote we mention because it is representative ; for 
the philosophy which prompted such a demand annu- 
ally saves thousands of merchants, manufacturers, and 
farmers from rushing into ruinous speculations, and 
preserves society itself from dissolving into a mere 
anarchy of fanaticisms. The resistance doubtless 
comes, in many cases, from stupidity ; but then stu- 
pidity is a great conservative power, especially in those 
periods of moral flippancy and benevolent persiflage 
when it rains invitations to square the circle, to under- 
take voyages to the moon, and to peril the existence of 
solid realities on the hope of establishing a millennium 
on their ruins. 

As the perfection of character depends on a man's 
embodying the facts and laws of his profession to such 
a degree of intensity that power and intelligence are 
combined in his activity, it is evident that mere unas- 
similated knowledge — knowledge that does not form 
part of the mind, but is attached to it — will often 
blunder as badly as ignorance itself. Thus Marshal 
Berthier enjoyed for some time the reputation of plan- 
ning Napoleon's battles, and of being a better general 
than his master, — an impression which his own conceit 



12 



CHARACTER. 



doubtless readily indorsed ; but the illusion was dis- 
pelled in the campaign of 1809, when Napoleon sent 
him on in advance to assume the command. It took 
him but a marvellously short time to bring the army to 
the brink of destruction, and his incompetency was so 
glaring that some of the marshals mistook it for treach- 
ery. Instead of concentrating the forces, he dispersed 
them over a field of operations forty leagues in extent, 
and exposed them to the danger of being destroyed in 
detail, thinking all the while that he was exhibiting 
singular depth of military genius ; when, in fact, it was 
only the opportune arrival of Napoleon, and his fierce, 
swift orders for immediate concentration, that saved 
the army from disgraceful dispersion and defeat, — 
an army which, under Napoleon, soon occupied Vienna, 
and eventually brought the campaign to a victorious 
conclusion at Wagram. 

It is, however, the misfortune of nations that such 
men as Berthier are not always tested by events, and 
the limitations of their capacity plainly revealed. 
Besides, it must be admitted that, in practical politics, 
circumstances sometimes lift into power small-minded 
natures, who are exactly level to the prejudices of their 
time, and thus make themselves indispensable to it. 
Mr. Addington, by the grace of intolerance made for a 
short period Prime Minister of England, — a man of 



CHARACTER. 



13 



great force of self-consequence, and great variety of 
demerit, — was one of these fortunate echoes of char- 
acter ; and as his littleness answered admirably to all 
that was little in the nation, he was, during his whole 
life, an important element of party power. Canning 
used despairingly to say of him, that " he was like the 
small-pox, — every administration had to take him 
oncer No party ever succeeded that did not thus 
represent the public nonsense as well as the public 
sense; and happy is that body of politicians where one 
of the members relieves his associates of all fear for 
their safety, not by his vigor or sagacity in administra- 
tion, but by his being one in whom the public nonsense 
knows it can confide. Indeed, Sydney Smith declares 
that every statesman who is troubled by a rush of ideas 
to the head should have his foolometer ever by his 
side, to warn him against offending or outstriding pub- 
lic opinion. This foolometer is as necessary to des- 
potic as to liberal governments ; for one great secret 
of the art of politics all over the world is, never to 
push evil or beneficent measures to that point where 
resistance commences on the part of the governed. 

Character, in its intrinsic nature, being thus the 
embodiment of things in persons, the quality which 
most distinguishes men of character from men of pas- 
sions and opinions is Persistency, tenacity of hold upon 



14 



CHARACTER. 



their work, and power to continue in it. This quality 
is the measure of the force inherent in character, and 
is the secret of the confidence men place in it, — 
soldiers in generals, parties in leaders, people in 
statesmen. Indeed, if we sharply scrutinize the lives 
of persons eminent in any department of action or 
meditation, we shall find that it is not so much bril- 
liancy and fertility as constancy and continuousness 
of effort .which make a man great. This is as true of 
Kepler and Newton as of Hannibal and Caesar; of 
Shakespeare and Scott as of Howard and Clarkson. 
The heads of such men are not merely filled with 
ideas, purposes, and plans, but the primary character- 
istic of their natures and inmost secret of their success 
is this : that labor cannot weary, nor obstacles discour- 
age, nor drudgery disgust them. The universal line 
of distinction between the strong and the weak is, that 
one persists ; the other hesitates, falters, trifles, and at 
last collapses or " caves in." 

This principle obtains in every department of affairs 
and every province of thought. Even in social life, 
it is persistency which attracts confidence more than 
talents and accomplishments. Lord Macaulay was the 
most brilliant, rapid, and victorious of talkers, — inex- 
haustible in words and in master, — so endless, indeed, 
that on those rare occasions when he allowed others to 



CHARACTER. 



15 



put in an occasional word, he was hit by Sydney 
Smith's immortal epigram, complimenting his " flashes 
of silence " ; but in character, and in the influence that 
radiates from character, he was probably inferior to his 
taciturn father, Zachary Macaulay, who, with an iron 
grasp of an unpopular cause, and a soul which was felt 
as inspiration in whatever company he Appeared, had 
still hardly a word to spare. The son conversed, but 
the mere presence of the father was conversation. 
The son excited admiration by what he said, the fatjier 
wielded power and enforced respect and became the 
object to which the conversation of the circle referred, 
in virtue of what he was, and of what everybody knew 
he would persist in being. 

In politics, again, no mere largeness of comprehen 
sion or loftiness of principle will compensate for a lack 
of persistency to bear, with a mind ever fresh and a 
purpose ever fixed, all the toil, dulness, fret, and dis- 
appointment of the business ; and this is perhaps the 
reason that, in politics, the perseverance of the sinners 
makes us blush so often for the pusillanimity of the 
saints. So, in war, mere courage and military talent 
are not always sufficient to make a great military 
commander. Thus Peterborough is, in comparison 
with Marlborough, hardly known as a general ; yet 
Peterborough, by his skilful and splendid audacity, 



16 



CHARACTER. 



gained victories which Marlborough might have been 
proud to claim. The difficulty with Peterborough was, 
that he could not endure being bored; while Marl- 
borough's endurance of bores was quite as marvellous 
as the military genius by which he won every battle he 
fought and took every place he besieged. If Peter- 
borough was prevented by the caution of his govern- 
ment or his allies from seizing an occasion for a great 
exploit, he resigned his command in a pet ; but Marl- 
borough patiently submitted to be robbed by the 
timidity of his allies of opportunities for victories 
greater even than those he achieved, and persisted, in 
spite of irritations which would have crazed a more 
sensitive spirit, until the object of the heterogeneous 
coalition which his genius welded together had been 
attained. 

Again, in the conduct of social and moral reforms, 
persistency is the test by which we discriminate men 
of moral opinions from men in whom moral opinions 
have been deepened into moral ideas and consolidated 
in moral character. To be sure, a man may, without 
character, seem to persist in the work of reform, 
provided society will fly into a passion with him, and 
thus furnish continual stimulants to his pride and pug- 
nacity ; but true persistency becomes indispensable 
when his ungracious task is to overcome that smiling 



CHARACTER. 



17 



indifference, that self-pleased ignorance, that half-pity- 
ing, irritating contempt with which a fat and con- 
tented community commonly receives the arguments 
and the invectives of innovation. It is the more 
important to insist on sinewy vigor and constancy in 
the champions of reform, because, in our day, the 
business attracts to it so many amateurs who mistake 
vague intellectual assent to possible improvements for 
the disposition and genius which make a reformer ; 
who substitute bustle for action, sauciness for audacity, 
the itch of disputation for the martyr-spirit ; and who 
arrive readily at prodigious results through a bland 
ignoring of all the gigantic obstacles in the path. 
Thus it would not be difficult, on any pleasant morn- 
ing, to meet at any city restaurant some ingenious 
gentleman getting what he is pleased to call a living 
after the old Adamic method of competition, who will, 
over a cup of coffee, dispose of concrete America in 
about ten minutes ; slavery disappears after the first 
sip ; the Constitution goes in two or three draughts ; 
the Bible vanishes in a pause of deglutitional satis- 
faction; and. a new order of society springs up while, 
in obedience to the old, he draws forth a reluctant 
shilling to pay for the beverage. Now, there is no 
disgrace in lacking insight into practical life, and power 
to change it for tfre better; but certainly these amia- 

B 



18 



CHARACTER. 



ble deficiencies are as gracefully exhibited in assent- 
ing to what is established as in playing at reform, 
attitudinizing martyrdom, and engaging in a scheme 
to overturn the whole world as a mere relaxation 
from the severer duties of life. 

In passing from practical life to literature, we shall 
find that persistency is the quality separating first-rate 
genius from all the other rates, — proving, as it does, 
that the author mentally and morally lives in the re- 
gion of thought and emotion about ^which he writes ; 
accepts the drudgery of composition as a path to the 
object he desires to master ; and is too much en- 
raptured with the beautiful vision before his eyes to 
weary of labor in its realization. In the creations of 
such men there is neither languor nor strain, but a 
" familiar grasp of things Divine." They are easily 
to be distinguished from less bountifully endowed na- 
tures and less raised imaginations. Thus Tennyson, 
as a man, is evidently not on a level with his works. 
He is rather a writer of poems than, like Wordsworth, 
essentially a poet ; and, accordingly, he only occasion- 
ally rises into that region where Wordsworth per- 
manently dwells ; the moment he ceases his intense 
scrutiny of his arrested mood, and aims to be easy 
and familiar, he but unbends into laborious flatness ; 
but we think a trained eye can detect, even in the 



CHARACTER. 19 

seeming commonplaces of Wordsworth, a ray of that 
light, " that never was on sea or land." Still, Ten- 
nyson, in his exalted moods, has a clear vision of a 
poetical conception, persists in his advances to it, 
discards all vagrant thoughts, and subordinates all 
minor ones, to give it organic expression ; and, when 
he descends from his elevation, always brings a poem 
with him, and not a mere collection of poetical lines 
and images. Such a man, though his poetical char- 
acter is — relatively to the greatest poets — imperfect, 
is still, of course, to be placed far above a mere men- 
tal roue, like the author of " Festus," who debauches 
in thoughts and sentiments ; pours forth memories 
and fancies with equal arrogance of originality ; and 
having no definite aim, except to be very fine and 
very saucy, produces little more than a collection of 
poetic materials, not fused, but confused. From such 
an anarchy of the faculties no great poem was ever 
born, for great poems are the creations of great in- 
dividualities, — of that causative and presiding " Me " 
which contemptuously rejects the perilous imperti- 
nences it spontaneously engenders, and drives the 
uature of which it is the centre persi-tingly on to 
the object that gleams in the distance. Make a man 
of Milton's force and affluence of imagination half-in- 
toxicated and half-crazy, and any enterprising booksel- 



20 



CHARACTER. 



ler might draw from the lees of his mind a " Festus " 
once a week, and each monstrosity would doubtless be 
hailed by some readers, w T ho think they have a taste 
for poetry, as a greater miracle of genius than " Par- 
adise Lost." 

Indeed, in all the departments of creative thought, 
fertility is a temptation to be resisted before inven- 
tions and discoveries are possible. The artist who 
dallies with his separate conceptions as they throng 
into his mind, produces no statue or picture, for that 
depends on austerely dismissing the most enticing im- 
ages, provided they do not serve his particular purpose 
at the time. The same truth holds in the inventive 
arts and in science. 

It is needless to say that the most common and 
most attractive manifestations of persistency of char- 
acter proceed from those natures in which the affec- 
tions are dominant. An amazing example, replete 
with that pathos which "lies too deep for tears," is 
found in the story, chronicled by John of Brompton, 
of the mother of Thomas-a-Becket. His father, Gil- 
bert-a-Becket, w T as taken prisoner during one of the 
Crusades by a Syrian Emir, and held for a consid- 
erable period in a kind of honorable captivity. A 
daughter of the Emir saw him at her father's table, 
heard him converse, fell in love with him, and offered 



V 



CHARACTER. 



21 



to arrange the means by which both might escape 
to Europe. The project only partly succeeded ; he 
escaped, but she was left behind. Soon afterward, 
however, she contrived to elude her attendants, and, 
after many marvellous adventures by sea and land, 
arrived in England, knowing but two English words, 
" London " and " Gilbert." By constantly repeating 
the first, she was directed to the city ; and there, 
followed by a mob, she walked for months from street 
to street, crying, as she went, " Gilbert ! Gilbert ! " 
She at last came to the street in which her lover 
lived. The mob and the name attracted the attention 
of a servant in the house ; Gilbert recognized her ; 
and they were married. We doubt if any poet, if 
even Chaucer, ever imaginatively conceived sentiment 
in a form so vital and primary as it is realized in 
this fact. 

Character, whether it be small or great, evil or 
good, thus always represents a positive and persisting 
force, and can, therefore, like other forces, be calcu- 
lated, and the issues of its action predicted. There i* 
nothing really capricious in character to a man gifted 
with the true piercing insight into it ; and Pope was 
right in bringing the charge of insanity against Curll, 
the bookseller, provided Curll did once speak politely 
to a customer, and did once refuse two-and-sixpence 



22 



CHARACTER. 



for Sir Richard Blackmore's Essays. There is nothing 
more mortifying to a reader of mankind than to be 
convicted of error in spelling out a character. We 
can all sympathize with the story of that person who 
was once requested, by a comparative stranger, to lend 
him ten dollars, to be returned the next day at ten 
o'clock. The request was complied with; but the 
lender felt perfectly certain that the borrower be- 
longed to that large and constantly-increasing class * 
of our fellow-citizens who are commonly included in 
the genus "sponge," and he therefore bade his money, 
as it left his purse, that affectionate farewell which is 
only breathed in the moment of permanent separa- 
tions. Much to his chagrin, however, the money was 
returned within a minute of the appointed time. A 
few days after, the same person requested a loan of 
thirty dollars, promising, as before, to return the sum 
at a specified hour. " No ! " was the response of in- 
sulted and indignant sagacity ; " you disappointed me 
once, sir, and I shall not give you an opportunity 
of doing it again." . 

A commanding mind in any station is indicated 
by the accuracy with which it calculates the power 
and working intelligence of the subaltern natures it 
uses. In business, in war, in government, in all 
matters where many agents are employed to produce 



CHARACTER. 



23 



a single result, one miscalculation of character by the 
person who directs the complex operation is sufficient 
to throw the whole scheme into confusion. Napo- 
leon's rage at General Dupont for capitulating at 
Baylen was caused not more by the disasters which 
flowed from it than by the irritation he felt in hav- 
ing confided to Dupont a task he proved incompetent 
to perform. Napoleon did not often thus miscalculate 
the capacity of his instruments. In the most des- 
perate exigency of the battle of Wagram he had a 
cheerful faith that he should in the end be victorious, 
relying, as he did, on two things, — probabilities to 
others, but certainties to him, — namely, that the col- 
umn led by Macdonald would pierce the Austrian 
centre, and . that the difficult operation committed to 
Davoust would be carried out, whatever failure might 
have been possible had it been intrusted to any other 
marshal. So, after the defeat at Essling, the success 
of Napoleon's attempt to withdraw his beaten army 
depended on the character of Massena, to whom the 
Emperor despatched a messenger, telling him to keep 
his position for two hours longer at Aspern. This 
order, couched in the form of a request, almost re- 
quired an impossibility ; but Napoleon knew the in- 
domitable tenacity of the man to whom he gave it. 
The messenger found Massena seated on a heap of 



24 



CHARACTER. 



rubbish, his eyes bloodshot, his frame weakened by his 
unparalleled exertions during a contest of forty hours, 
and his whole appearance indicating a physical state 
better 'fitting the hospital than the field. But that 
steadfast soul seemed altogether unaffected by bodily 
prostration. Half dead as he was with physical fatigue, 
he rose painfully, and said : " Tell the Emperor that 
I will hold out for two hours — six — twenty-four — ■ 
as long as it is necessary for the safety of the army." 
And, it is needless to add, he kept his w r ord. 

In politics, where so many foul purposes are veiled 
in fair pretences, the calculation of character is of pri- 
mal importance ; but the process requires insight and 
foresight beyond what people commonly exercise in 
practical affairs, and the result is that misconception of 
men and events which has so often involved individuals 
and governments in frightful calamities. A true judg- 
ment of persons penetrates through the surface to the 
centre and substance of their natures, and can even 
detect in pretences, which may deceive the pretenders 
themselves; that subtle guile which corrupt character 
always infuses into the most celestial professions of 
morality or humanity. In every French revolution, 
for example, it rains beneficent words ; but, if we really 
desire to know how the bland and amiable humanities 
cf the movement are to terminate, we must give slight 



CHARACTER. 



25 



attention to what the social and political leaders say 
and think, except so far as in their sayings and 
thoughts there are occasionally those unconscious es- 
capes of character which shed unwilling light on what 
they really are and what they really mean. We must 
not hesitate to deny undoubted truths if they are pom- 
pously announced for the purpose of serving the ends 
of falsehood. There is an acrid gentleman of my ac- 
quaintance, who, whenever he* sees a quack advertise- 
ment commencing with the startling interrogation, 
" Is health desirable ? " instantly answers, " No ! " be- 
cause, if the premise be once admitted, the pills follow 
in logical sequence ; and, to save health in the concrete, 
he is willing to deny it in the abstract. So it is well to 
reject even liberty, equality, and fraternity, when, from 
the nature of their champions, or from the nature of 
the society to which they are applied, equality means 
the dominion of a clique, fraternity introduces massa- 
cre, and liberty ushers in Louis Napoleon and the 
Empire. It was by looking through the rodomontade 
of such virtue prattlers, and looking at men and things 
in their essential principles, that Burke was enabled to 
predict the issue of the French Revolution of 1789, and 
to give French news in advance, not merely of the 
mail, but of the actual occurrence of events. He read 
events in their principles and causes. 
2 



26 



CHARACTER. 



This calculation of character, this power of discern- 
ing the tendencies and results of actions in the nature 
of their actors, is not confined to practical life, but is 
applicable also to literature, — another great field in 
which character is revealed, and to which some allusion 
has already been made in treating of persistency. As 
all the vital movements of the mind are acts, character 
may be as completely expressed in the production of a 
book as in the conduct of a battle or the establishment 
of an institution, ^his is not merely the case in 
authors like Montaigne, Charles Lamb, and Sydney 
Smith, whose quaint exposure of individual -peculiar- 
ities constitutes no small portion of their charm ; or in 
authors like Rousseau and Byron, who exultingly 
exact attention to their fooleries and obliquities by 
furiously dragging their readers into the privacies of 
their moral being ; or in authors like Lamartine, who 
seem to dwell in an innocent ignorance or dainty denial 
of all external objects which offend their personal 
taste3, and who dissolve their natures into a senti- 
mental mist, which is diffused over every province of 
nature and human life which they appear to describe 
or portray. But the same principle, in these so glar- 
ingly apparent, holds with regard to writers whose 
natures are not obtruded upon the attention, but which 
escape in the general tone and animating spirit of their 



CHARACTER. 



27 



productions. Guizot and Milman have both subjected 
the original authorities, consulted by Gibbon in his his- 
tory of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, to 
the intensest scrutiny, to see if the historian has per- 
verted, falsified, or suppressed facts. Their judgment 
is in favor of his honesty and his conscientious re- 
search. Yet this by no means proves that we can 
obtain through his history the real truth of persons an^d 
events. The whole immense tract of history he trav- 
erses he has thoroughly Gihbonized. The qualities of 
his character steal out in every paragraph ; the words 
are instinct with Gibbon's nature ; though the facts 
may be obtained from without, the, relations in which 
they are disposed are communicated from within ; and 
the human race for fifteen centuries is made tributary 
to Gibbon's thought, wears the colors and badges of 
Gibbon's nature, is denied the possession of any pure 
and exalted experiences which Gibbon cannot verify by 
his own ; and the reader, who is magnetized by the 
historian's genius, rises from the perusal of the vast 
work, informed of nothing as it was in itself, but every- 
thing as it appeared to Gibbon, and especially doubting 
two things, — that there is any chastity in women, or 
any divine truth in .Christianity. Yet we suppose thav 
Gibbon would not, by critics, be ranked in the subjec- 
tive class of writers, but in the objective class. Still, 



28 



CHARACTER. 



the sensuality and scepticism which are in him are in- 
fused into the minds of his docile readers with more 
refined force than Rousseau and Byron ever succeeded 
in infusing theirs. 

Every author, indeed, who really influences the mind, 
who plants in it thoughts and sentiments which take 
root and grow, communicates his character. Error and 
immorality, — two words for one thing, for error is the 
immorality of the intellect, and immorality the error of 
the heart, — these escape from him if they are in him, 
and pass into the recipient mind through subtle avenues 
invisible to consciousness. TTe accordingly sometimes 
find open natures, gifted with more receptivity than 
power of resistance or self-assertion, spotted all over 
with the sins of the intellects they have hospitably 
entertained, exhibiting evidence of having stormed 
heaven with JEschylus, and anatomized damnation 
with Dante, and revelled in indecencies with Rabelais, 
and got drunk with Burns, and violated all the austerer 
moralities with Moore. 

Influence being thus the communication from one 
mind to another of positive individual life, great na- 
tures are apt to overcome smaller natures, instead of 
developing them, — a conquest and usurpation as com- 
mon in literature as in practical affairs. This spiritual 
despotism, wielded by the Caesars and Napoleons of 



CHARACTER. 



29 



thought, ever implies personal and concentrated might 
in the despot ; and the process of its operation is very 
different from those mental processes in which some 
particular faculty or sentiment acts, as it were, on its 
own account, — processes which lack all living force 
and influence, creating nothing, communicating nothing, 
equally good for nothing and bad for nothing. Thus, 
by wading through what Robert Hall calls the " con- 
tinent of mud " of a mechanical religious writer, it is 
impossible to obtain any religious life ; and diabolical 
vitality will perhaps be as vainly sought in the volumes 
of such a mechanical reprobate as Wycherley. But 
the moment you place yourself in relation with living 
minds, you find Shakespeare pouring Norman blood in- 
to your veins and the feudal system into your thoughts, 
and Milton putting iron into your will, and Spinoza 
entangling your poor wit in inextricable meshes of 
argumentation, and Goethe suffusing your whole nature 
with a sensuous delight, which converts heroism itself 
into a phase of the comfortable, and disinterestedness 
into one of the fine arts. The natures of such men, 
being deeper, healthier, and more broadly inclusive 
than the natures of intense and morbid authors, are 
necessarily stronger, more searching, and admit of less 
resistance. In order that they may be genially assimi- 
lated, we must keep them at such a distance^ as to save 



30 



CHARACTER. 



our own personality from being insensibly merged into 
theirs. They are dangerous guests if they eat you, but 
celestial visitants if you can contrive to eat even a por- 
tion of them. It is curious to see what queer pranks 
they sometimes play with aspiring mediocrities, unqual- 
ified to receive more than the forms of anything, who 
strut about in their liveries, ostentatious of such badges 
of intellectual servitude, and emulous to act in the 
farce of high life as it is below stairs. Thus, when 
Goethe first invaded the United States, it was noised 
about that he was a many-sided man, free from every 
.sort of misdirecting enthusiasm, and conceiving and pre- 
senting all things in their right relations. Instantly a 
swarm of Goethes sprang up all around us, wantoning 
in nonchalance and the fopperies of comprehensiveness. 
The thing was found to be easier even than Byronism, 
requiring no scowls, no cursing and swearing, no in- 
creased expenditure for cravats and gin ; and, accord- 
ingly, one could hardly venture into society without 
meeting some youthful bla&e, whose commonplace was 
trumpeted as comprehension, whose incellectual laziness 
was dignified with the appellation of repose, and whose 
many-sidedness was the feeble expression of a person- 
ality without sufficient force to rise even into one-sided- 
ness. 

So far we have considered character principally as 



CHARACTER. 



31 



it works in practical affairs and in literature ; but 
perhaps its grandest and mightiest exemplifications are 
in' those rare men who have passed up, through a 
process of life and growth, from the actual world 
into the region of universal sentiments and great spir- 
itual ideas. Every step in the progress of such men 
is through material and spiritual facts, each of which 
is looked into, looked through, and converted into 
force for further advance. The final elevation they 
attain, being the consequence of natural growth, has 
none of the instability of heights reached by occa- 
sional raptures of aspiration, but is as solid and as firm 
as it is high ; and their characters, expressed in deeds 
all alive with moral energy, are fountains whence the 
world is continually replenished with a new and nobler 
life. A great and comprehensive person of this ex- 
alted order, to whom the imaginations of the poet 
seem but the commonplaces of the heaven in which 
he dwells, is not to be confounded with his counter- 
feits, that is, with certain agile natures that leap, 
with one bound of thought, from the every-day world 
(o an abstract and mocking ideal ; and, perched on 
their transitory elevation, fleer and gibe at the social 
system to which they really belong, and of which, 
with all its sins and follies, they are far from being 
the best or the wisest members. The impression left 



CHARACTER. 



by the reality is radiant spiritual power ; the impres- 
sion left by the counterfeit is simply pertness. 

But let a great character, with the celestial city 
actually organized within him, descend upon a com- 
munity to revolutionize and reform, and, in the con- 
flict which ensues, he is sure to be victorious, for he 
is strong with a diviner strength than earth knows, 
and wields weapons whose stroke no mortal armor 
can withstand. If he come at all, he comes in a bodily 
form, and he comes to disturb ; and society, with a 
bright apprehension of these two facts, has heretofore 
thought it a shrewd contrivance to remove him to 
another w r orld before he had utterly disordered this. 
But in this particular case its axes, and gibbets, 
and fires could not apply ; for the tremendous per- 
sonality it sought to put out of the way had been 
built up by an assimilation of the life of things ; and 
all mortal engines were therefore powerless to destroy 
one glowing atom of his solid and immortally persist- 
ing nature. Accordingly, after his martyrdom, he is 
the same strange, intrusive, pertinacious, resistless force 
that he was before ; active as ever in every part of 
the social frame ; pervading the community by degrees 
with his peculiar life ; glaring in upon his murderers 
in their most secret nooks of retirement; rising, like 
the ghost of Banquo, to spread horror and amaze- 



CHARACTER. 33 

ment over their feasts ; searing their eyeballs with 
strange " sights," even in the public markets ; nor 
does he put off the torment of his presence until the 
cowards who slew him have gone, like Henry the 
Second, to the tomb of Becket, and, in the agonies 
of fear and remorse, have canonized him as a saint. 

In these' scattered remarks on a subject broad as 
human life, and various as the actual and possible 
combinations of the elements of human nature, I have 
attempted to indicate the great vital fact in human 
affairs, that all influential power, in all the depart- 
ments of practical intellectual and moral energy, is 
the expression of character, of forcible, persisting, and 
calculable persons, who have grown up into a stat- 
ure more or less colossal through an assimilation of 
material or spiritual realities. This fact makes pro- 
duction the test and measure of power, imprints on 
production the mental and moral imperfections of 
that power, and, with a kind of sullen sublimity, 
declares that as a man is so shall be his work. It 
thus remorselessly tears off all the gaudy ornaments 
of opinion and phrase with which conceit bedizens 
weakness, and exhibits each person in his essential 
personality. The contemplation of this fact, like the 
contemplation of all facts, may sadden the sentimental 
and the luxurious, as it reveals Alps to climb, not 



34 CHARACTER. 

bowers of bliss to bask in ; but to manly natures, who 
disdain the trappings of pretension, the prospect is 
lieal thy, and the sharp sleet air invigorating. By 
showing that men and things are not so good or so 
great as they seem, it may destroy the hope born of 
our dreams ; but it is the source of another and more 
bracing hope, bom of activity and intelligence. By 
the acidity with which it mocks the lazy aspirations, 
blown up as bubbles from the surface of natures which 
are really crumbling into dust amidst their pretty 
playthings, this fact may seem a sneering devil ; 
but if it start into being one genuine thrill of vital 
thought, or touch that inmost nerve of activity whence 
character derives its force, it will be found to cheer 
and to point upward like other angels of the Lord. 



II. 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 

ONE of the most prominent characteristics which 
strike an observer of human life is the sulky, 
sleepy common sense which shapes, guides, and lim- 
its its ordinary affairs ; a common sense fruitful of 
definite opinions, creative of stable works, solid, per- 
severing, consistent, intolerant of innovation, contemp- 
tuous of abstract truth and ideal right, and most 
sublimely* content with itself. This common intelli- 
gence, the democracy of reason, the wits love to 
stigmatize as stupidity, because it rigorously resists 
all substitution of smart sayings for commodious in- 
stitutions, and is insensible to the value of all thoughts 
which w 7 ill not hitch on to things. It believes in 
bread, beef, houses, laws, trade, talent, the prices- 
current, the regular course of events, and, perhaps, 
in the spirituality of table-knock ings ; it disbelieves in 
total abstinence, woman's rights, transcendentalism, 
perfectibility, and to the humane interrogation "Am 
I not a man and a brother ? " it stoutly answers, " No, 



36 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



you are not ! " The great merit of this common sense 
consists in its representing the average intellect and 
conscience of the civilized world, — of that portion of 
intelligence, morality, and Christianity vwhich has been 
practically embodied in life and active -power. It de- 
stroys pretence and quackery, and tests genius and 
heroism. It changes with the progress of society ., 
persecutes in one age what it adopts in the next ; 
its martyrs of the sixteenth century are its prece- 
dents and exponents of the nineteenth ; and a good 
part of the common sense of an elder day is the 
common nonsense of our own. hit would decay and 
die out were it not continually nourished by the nevt 
and freshening life poured into it by the creative 
thinkers whom it denounces as unpractical*visionaries 
It always yields in the end to every person who rep 
resents a higher intellectual, moral, or spiritual ener 
gy than its own, and the grandest achievement of 
individual power is the conception of a new thought 
of such indestructible and victorious vitality, that il 
breaks through all the obstacles which obstruct the 
passage of heresies into truisms, and converts private 
opinion into common sense. 

It would seem to be a good law of life that mer. 
should be thus associated in m . mental recognition of 
common principles of intelligence, level to their ordi 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



37 



nary actions, and thus present a solid bulwark of 
sound character, on which pretension should try its 
tricks, and nonsense spend its fury, in vain, but 
which genuine intellectual or moral energy might 
overturn or overleap. The great office of common 
sense is to set up the general wisdom and the gen- 
eral will against the caprices of individual opinion 
and the excesses of self-will. Its maxims and prov 
erbs constitute a kind of intellectual currency, issued, 
apparently, on the authority of human nature, and 
based on the experience of sixty centuries. The de- 
viations from its established order, whether the devi- 
ations of whim or the deviations of genius, it calls 
Eccentricity. The essential characteristic of this or- 
der consists in its disposing things according to their 
mutual relations, — the natural relations they would 
assume in practical life, provided they received no 
twists from individual vanity, or conceit, or passion. 
Eccentricity is the disturbance of the relations enjoined 
by common sense, and a habit of looking at things, 
not in their relations to each other, but in their re- 
lations to the dominant wilfulness of the individual. 
Its most ordinary form is the rebellion of mediocrity 
against the laws of its own order. When this pro- 
ceeds on any grounds of original disposition, it soon 
exalts caprice into a principle and organizes crotchets 



38 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



into character. Men of this stamp, in whose huddled 
minds disorder is welded together by a kind of crazy 
force of individuality, commonly pass for more than 
they are worth. Their self-will, the parent of bound- 
less impudence and furious self-assertion, gives au- 
dacity to intellectual littleness, raciness to intellectual 
anarchy, and a certain flash and sparkle to meanness 
and malice. The little brain they have, thus galvan- 
ized by constant contact with the personal pronoun, 
presents a gran # d exhibition of mediocrity in convul- 
sions, of spite in spasms, of impulses in insurrection 
animating thoughts in heaps. Commonplaces are 
made to look like novelties by being shot forth in 
hysteric bursts. Startling paradoxes are created out 
of inverted truisms. The delirium of impatient sensa- 
tions is put forward as the rapture of heaven-scaling 
imaginations. Yet through all the jar, and discord, 
and fussy miscreativeness of such chaotic minds there 
runs an unmistakable individuality, by which you can 
discriminate one crazy head from another, and refer 
the excesses of each to their roots in character. 

It is only, however, when eccentricity connects 
itself with genius that we have its raciest and most 
riotous disregard of the restraints of custom and the 
maxims of experience. Sane and healthy genius, it 
is true, is often at w r ar with recognized principles 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



without being eccentric. If it violates the conven- 
tional order, and disturbs the practical relations of 
things, it is because it discerns a higher order, and 
discovers relations more essential. Eccentricity views 
things in relation to its own crotchet ; genius, in re- 
lation to a new idea. There is a world-wide differ- 
ence between the eccentric fanaticism of John of 
Munster and the religious genius of Martin Luther, 
though both assailed the established order. But 
genius itself sometimes falls under the dominion of 
wilfulness and whim, and it then creates magnificent 
crotchets of its own. Let us now survey this two- 
fold eccentricity of 'ordinary and extraordinary minds, 
as it appears in social life, in the arena of politics 
1 and government, in religion, and, in its more refined 
expression, in literature and art. 

In regard to the eccentricities of character devel- 
oped in social life, the most prominent relate to the 
freaks of impulse and passion. In most old commu- 
nities there is a common sense even in sensuality. 
Vice itself gets gradually digested into a system, is 
amenable to certain laws of conventional propriety 
and honor, has for its object simply the gratification 
of its appetites, and frowns with quite a conservative 
air on all new inventions, all untried experiments, 
in iniquity. There is often, for instance, in gluttony 



40 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



a solid and stolid respectability, a calm and grand 
devotion of the whole man to the gastronomic ec- 
stasy, which evinces that appetite has been organized 
into faith and life. Thus Doctor Johnson, at a Lord 
Mayor's dinner, committed the scandalous impropriety 
of talking wit and wisdom to an alderman by his 
side, who desired to concentrate his whole energies 
on the turtle. " Sir," said the alderman, in a tone 
and with a look of awful rebuke, "in attempting 
to listen to your long sentences, and give you a 
short answer, I have swallowed two pieces of green 
fat, without tasting the flavor. I beg you to let me 

i 

enjoy my present happiness in peace." Examples 
might be multiplied of the gravity and sobriety which 
vices assume when they are institutions as well as 
appetites. 

But the spoiled children of w r ealth, rank, and fash- 
ion soon profess themselves bored with this time- 
honored, instituted, and decorous dissoluteness, and 
demand something more stimulating and piquant, 
something which will tickle vanity and plume will. 
A certain crazy vehemence of individual life, in 
which impatience of restraint is combined with a 
desire to startle, leads them to attempt to scale the 
eminences of immorality by originalities in lawless- 
ness and discoveries in diabolism. Despising the timid 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



41 



science of the old fogies of sensuality, these bright 
young fellows let loose all the reins of restraint, flame 
out in all the volatilities of sin and vagaries of vice, 
and aim to realize a festivity dashed with insanity 
and spiced with satanic pride. They desire not 
merely wine, but the " devil's wine " ; something which 
will give a zest, a sharp, tingling, fearful, wicked 
relish to excess. They have a kind of ki hunger and 
thirst after unrighteousness " ; and, poets in dissipa- 
tion, pursue a constantly receding ideal of frantic 
delight. Their deity of pleasure is the bewitching 
daughter of sin and death, who streams . mockingly 
before their inward vision with flushed cheeks, crazy, 
sparkling eyes, and mad, dishevelled tresses. Such 
were Buckingham, Rochester, Wharton, Queensberry, 
— noble roues, high in the peerage of debauch, 
whose brilliant rascality illustrates the annals of ec- 
centric libertinism ; who devoted their lives, fortunes, 
and sacred honor to the rights of reprobates, and 
raised infamy itself to a kind of fame ; — men who 
had a sublime ambition to become heroes in sensual- 
ity, and seem to have taken for their model that 
Dionysius of Sicily whom Plutarch commemorates as 
having prolonged a drunken feast through ninety days. 
Rochester, when he fell into the hands of Bishop 
Burnet, could hardly recollect the time when he had 



42 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



been sober, and might, with the amiable simplicity 
recorded of another inebriate, have staggered into an 
intelligence office, to know where he had been for the 
last ten years. Wharton, bragging to Swift of his 
drunken frolics, was advised by that cynical satirist to 
vary his caprices a little, and take a frolic to be vir- 
tuous. Indeed, in these men the " wet damnation " 
of drunkenness seems to have filtered through their 
senses into their souls, so as to make reason reel and 
conscience stagger, and the whole man to decline 
from an immoral into an unmoral being. Yet this 
suicide of soul and body is, by such disciples and 
martyrs of pleasure, ludicrously misnamed " life." 
Its philosophy is concentrated in a remark made by 
George Selwyn, as he surveyed himself in the glass, 
the day after a heroic debauch : " I look and feel 
villanously bad," he said ; " but, hang it, it is life, — 
it is life ! " 

These devotees and fanatics of pleasure represent 
that form of eccentricity in which the head seems too 
small for the passions of the individual to move about 
in, and they accordingly appear to craze and rend 
the brain in the desperate effort to escape from their 
prison. But there are other eccentrics in whom we 
observe the opposite process, persons whose thoughts 
and feelings are all turned inward, and group or 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



43 



huddle round some conceit of their wilfulness, some 
hobby of their intellect, or some master disposition 
of their selfishness. These are the men who gradu- 
ally become insane on some one darling peculiarity 
of character, which is exaggerated into huge size by 
assiduous training. It is, as Sir Thomas Browne 
would say, " an acorn in their young brows which 
grows to an oak in their old heads." Conceit, for 
instance, often ends in making a man mentally and 
morally deaf and blind. He hears nothing but the 
whispers of vanity, he sees nothing but what is re- 
flected in the mirror of self-esteem, though society all 
the while may be on the broad grin or in a civil 
titter at his pompous nothingness. He will doubt 
everything before he doubts his own importance ; 
and his folly, being based on a solid foundation of 
self-delusion, steals out of him in the most uncon- 
scious and innocent way in the world. Thus the 
proud Duke of Somerset, whose conceit was in his 
rank and his long line of forefathers, once declared 
that he sincerely pitied Adam because he had no an- 
cestors. The Earl of Buchan, a poor aristocrat, was 
accustomed to brood in his Edinburgh garret over 
the deeds and splendors of his ancestors, until he 
identified himself with them, and would startle his 
acquaintances with the remark, " When I was in 



44 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



Palestine with Richard of the Lion Heart," or, " As 
I was going to see the execution of Charles the 
First," such and such things occurred. His greater 
brother, Erskine, the glory of Westminster Hall, was 
an egotist of genius, and was such a spendthrift of 
the personal pronoun, that Cobbett, who was once 
printing one of his speeches, stopped in the middle, 
giving as his reason, that at this point the " I's 99 in 
his fount of type gave out, and he could not proceed. 
This egotism, which in Erskine was mingled with 
genius and good-nature, often frets itself into a mor- 
bid unreasonableness which is satire-proof. Thus we 
heard but the other day of an eccentric German 
who prosecuted an author who had anticipated him in 
the publication of an invention, on the ground that 
the idea had been abstracted from his own head 
through a process of animal magnetism. But the 
most sovereign and malignant of these eccentric ego- 
tists was undoubtedly Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, 
who, while she lived, w 7 as the most terrible creature 
in Great Britain. She bullied Queen Anne, and she 
henpecked the Great Duke himself, who, serene as 
a summer morning in a tempest of bullets, cowered 
in his own palace before her imperious will. She 
defied everything, death included. Indeed, death, like 
everybody else, seemed to be afraid of her. In her 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



45 



old age she became as ugly and as spiteful a crone as 
ever was ducked or burned for witchcraft. She took 
a malicious delight in living, because, though life gave 
her no pleasure, it gave others pain. At one time 
it was thought she must go. She lay for a great 
while speechless and senseless. The physician said, 
" She must be blistered or she will die." This 
touched her, and she screamed out, " / won't be blis- 
tered, and I won't die ! " and she kept her word. 

But the mirth of society changes to wailing when 
this conceit develops itself into a hobby, and takes 
men by the button to pester them with the rationale 
of its bit of absurdity. The hobby-monger is the 
only perfect and consummated bore, and eccentricity 
in him becomes a very dismal joke. Self-convinced 
of the value of his original, deeply cogitated piece of 
nonsense, he is determined to devote his life, and 
your money, to the task of converting his great 
thought into a great fact, and to make incapacity 
itself a source of income. The thing is a new mode 
of levying black-mail, for the cheapest way to escape 
from the teasing persecution of his tongue is to de- 
liver up your purse. His success generates a whole 
brood of blockheads, who install hobbyism into an 
institution, and flood the country with hobby patriot- 
ism, hobby science, hobby medicine, hobby philan* 



46 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



thropy, hobby theology, hobby morality, and hobby 
immorality. Dunces who never had but one thought 
in their lives, — and that a foolish one, — they cling to 
that with the tenacity of instinct, and set up, on the 
strength of it, as Galileos, or Arkwrights, or Clark- 
sons, or Luthers, transmuting sneers, gibes, invectives, 
blows, into a sweet, celestial ichor, to slake the thirst 
of their conceit. They are, to be sure, very candid 
gentlemen. Their cry is, " Examine before you con- 
demn." Ah ! examine ; but, since the lamented de- 
cease of Methuselah, human life has been unfortunately 
contracted, and human knowledge unfortunately en- 
larged, and it is really the coolest impertinence im- 
aginable to expect that a man will spend his short 
existence in inspecting and exploding humbugs, and 
end at fourscore in establishing a principle which he 
ought to have taken on trust in his teens. It is 
better to' ride a hobby of one's own than to give 
one's whole attention to discovering the futility of 
the hobbies of others ; and better still, as these gen- 
tlemen are determined that society shall support them, 
to save time by submitting to assessment. In our 
country the hobby-mongers seem fairly to be in the 
ascendant, and the right to mind one's own business 
must be purchased of these idle dunces portentously 
developed into voluble bores. Whatever may be their 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



47 



plan, and however deep may be their self-deception, 
their principle of action is identical with that of 
Punch's music-grinder, who contemptuously refuses 
the penny you toss at him, to silence his soul-stab- 
bing melodies, and clamorously demands a shilling 
as the price of his " moving on." " Don't you sup 
pose," he inquires, " that I know the vally of peace 
and quietness as well as you ? " 

But the conceit of one's self and the conceit of 
one's hobby are hardly more prolific of eccentricity 
than the conceit of one's money. Avarice, the most 
hateful and wolfish of all the hard, cool, callous dis- 
positions of selfishness, has its own peculiar caprices 
and crotchets. The ingenuities of its meanness defy 
all the calculations of reason, and reach the miracu- 
lous in subtlety. Foote, in endeavoring to express 
the microscopic niggardliness of a miser of his ac- 
quaintance, expressed a belief that he would be will- 
ing to take the beam out of his own eye if he knew 
he could sell the -timber. Doubtless one source of 
the eccentric miser's insane covetousness and parsi- 
mony is the tormenting fear of dying a beggar, — 
that " fine horror of poverty," according to Lamb, 
u by which he is not content to keep want from the 
door, or at arm's length, but he places it, by heap- 
ing wealth upon wealth, at a sublime distance" 



48 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



Well, after saving, and pinching, and scraping, and 
stealing, and freezing, and starving, Curmudgeon, the 
skeleton, comes face to face with another skeleton, 
Death, and that fleshless form, with an ironic grin, 
huddles him away, — and he is remembered only by 
those he has cheated. But his perverse sharpness 
does not desert him even in his last hours. Scrooge 
is reported to be dying. It is said that in his will 
he has left something to a charitable society, and the 
secretary thereof " happens in," to console him. " You 
think," says Scrooge, with a malicious sparkle in his 
closing eyes, " that I am going, but the doctor says 
the attack is not fatal. If you will take that bequest 
now, at a deduction of ten per cent, I'll pay it." 
" Done ! " said the secretary. " Done ! " says Scrooge, 
and dies, — dies consistent and triumphant, with a 
discount on his lips instead of a prayer. 

It is, however, in politics and public affairs that 
the strange antics of eccentricity produce the smart- 
est shocks of surprise. Here everything is done in 
the eyes of men, and disordered minds parade their 
caprices to a laughing or cursing world. In this 
sphere of action and passion it is impossible to group 
or define. The representation tends to become as 
wild and whirling as the vagaries, volatilities, and 
inconsistencies it describes. It requires more than 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



49 



ordinary steadiness of character for a statesman to 
escape from the eccentricities produced by ambition, 
and the eccentricities produced by reaching the object 
of ambition, — power. The strife of politics tends to 
unsettle the calmest understanding, and ulcerate the 
most benevolent heart. There are no bigotries or 
absurdities too gross for parties to create or adopt 
under the stimulus of political passions. The path 
of all great statesmen lies between two opposing in- 
sanities, and we can never appreciate the superb se- 
renity of such men as "Washington, Hamilton, Jay, 
Jefferson, Madison, until we realize the atmosphere 
of madness, rancor, and folly they were compelled 
to breathe. There, for instance, among other causes 
or occasions of political eccentricity, is the love of 
innovation in itself, and the hatred of 'innovation in 
itself ; both productive of eccentric partisans, in whose 
struggles common sense is suspended by mutual con- 
sent. By the eccentric reformer, institutions are de- 
nounced as confining Liberty in strait-waistcoats ; by 
the eccentric conservative, Liberty is denounced as 
putting firebrands into the hands of madmen. Thus 
many of our disgusted American conservatives ap- 
plauded Louis Napoleon's usurpation on the ground 
that he would restore old abuses, and saw France, 
with delight, leap back thousands of years to the old 

3 D 



50 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER* 



Egyptian monarchy of kings, priests, and soldiers. 
Gibbon, though the most subtle of religious sceptics, 
had a morbid hatred of political change, and, on the 
breaking out of the French Revolution, joined the 
bishops of the Established Church in assailing it. 
He could not help, however, indulging an ironical 
fling at the new political friends who were his old 
theological enemies, and blandly reminded them that 
if, in his history, he had been a little hard on the 
primitive church, it was from the best of principles 
and the best of motives, for that church was an in- 
novation on the old Pagan Establishment. But the 
greatest conservative of this sort was Lord- Chancel- 
lor Thurlow. A deputation of Presbyterians having 
waited on him to request his aid in obtaining the re- 
peal of certain statutes disqualifying their body from 
holding civil offices, Thurlow thus bluffly answered: 
u Gentlemen, I will be perfectly frank with you. 
Gentlemen, I am against you, and for the Established 

Church, by ! Not that I like the Established 

Church a bit better than any other church, but be- 
cause it is established. And whenever you can get 

your religion established, I '11 be for that too. 

Good morning to you ! " 

In the eccentricity of politicians the two most 
striking qualities are levity and malignity, — some- 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



times existing apart, and sometimes coexisting ir one 
mind. The most magnificent instance of levity, com- 
bined with genius and eloquence, is found, perhaps, 
in Charles Townshend, the chancellor of the exchequer, 
who revived the scheme of American taxation, and 
who carried into the councils of Great Britain a 
brain large enough for the weightiest affairs, but in- 
toxicated with impudence, conceit, and champagne. 
The conceptions of a statesman and the courage of a 
hero were strangely blended in him with a spirit as 
volatile, sparkling, and unscrupulous as ever animated 
the rake of the old comedy. It was as if Sir Har- 
ry Wildair's tricksiness and mercurial temperament 
had passed into the head of Camden or Chatham. 
In the majority of cases, however, the ambition or 
possession of power develops malignity in disordered 
minds. In John Randolph it took the shape of a 
fretful spite which poisoned all it touched, even his 
own fine faculties. This mingled levity and malig- 
nity, however, are never seen in their full absurdi- 
ties and terrors, unless power be absolute, and caprice 
ranges over a kingdom or an empire, unrestrained by 
opinion or law. From the old Oriental despots to 
"the thing of blood and mud" that lately sat throned 
in Naples, the history of eccentric despots presents 
such a spectacle of monkey-like mischievousness com- 



52 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



bined with demon-like malice, that we can hardly 
recognize human nature in a form so diabolically car- 
icatured. Iu Nero, Caligula, Domitian, Commodus, 
Heliogabalus, Paul of Kussia, we observe that pecu- 
liar perversity which does wrong things because they 
are wrong ; and also that last resource of little minds, 
the desire to startle by the commission of unnatural 
crimes, evincing the feebleness and barrenness of tal- 
ent so apt to be associated with such monstrous 
brutality of disposition* Nero, for example, finds that 
the luxury of murder palls on his jaded sense, and 
the poor creature can hit upon no stimulant likely 
to keep alive his relish for that form of ferocity 
short of murdering his wife and mother ; and at the 
end — for under such governments there is a decline 
so deep in the character of the virtues that treachery 
becomes justice, and assassination becomes patriotism 
— he dies as thoroughly blase as a London cox- 
comb, and as abjectly timid as a girl who has seen 
a ghost. 

This eccentric malignity is also often developed 
in men whose minds are unsettled by their being 
lifted, in the tempests of faction, to a power they 
are unfitted to exercise. They are Pucks raised to 
the seat of Jove. Even Robespierre, — who before 
he became a politician resigned a judicial office be- 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



53 



cause lie was opposed to capital punishment, — seemed 
to have been marked out by nature for an opinionated 
philanthropist, sour and wilful withal, but well-mean- 
ing, honest, self-sacrificing, narrow in mind, and obsti- 
nate in purpose. When he came to be the head of 
that prolonged mob, the government of France during 
the Reign of Terror, the poverty of his talents com- 
pelled him to meet the crisis of affairs by the exploded 
maxims of the old tyrants. Like all incompetent 
men who are cursed with power, he tried to make 
violence do the work of insight and foresight. He 
slew because he could not think; He ended in being 
fiendish because he started in being foolish. The lit- 
tie thought he had took the shape of an inexorable 
but bad logic. He tried to solve a political problem, 
which might have tasked the genius, energy, and ex- 
perience of the greatest statesman, with a little syllo- 
gism, of which the Eights of Man and the chopping off 
the heads of aristocrats constituted the premises, and 
of which peace, happiness, equality, and fraternity were 
to be the logical conclusion. The more he chopped, 
however, the more complicated became his difficulties. 
New and more puzzling problems sprang up from the 
soil he watered with blood. The time came when mere 
perversity and presumption could carry it no longer. 
His adherents informed him at night that he was to 



54 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



be denounced and slain in the Convention on. the 
morrow, and offered him the means of crushing his 
enemies. He leaned that barren head of his against 
a pillar, and for two hours tried to frame some plan 
by which to carry on the government in case he 
triumphed. But the poor fellow's invention had been 
exhausted in the production of his little syllogism, 
which had miserably failed of success. He could 
do nothing, he saw, but go on murdering and mur- 
dering, and he had got somewhat tired of that. The 
thought that would open a path through the entan- 
glements of his situation would not come into that 
unfertile brain. So, in mere despair, he told his ad- 
herents to let tilings take their course, went to the 
Convention, uttered his usual declamation, was de- 
nounced, set upon, and slain ; and thus a capital 
leader of a debating club, like many a clever man 
before and since, was ruined by the misfortune of 
being placed at the head of a nation. 

It is both impossible to avoid, and dangerous to 
touch, in an essay like this, the subject of religious 
eccentricity, though the deviations here from the line 
of admitted truths and duties are innumerable in 
amount and variety. There is, first, the eccentricity 
which proceeds from observing the proprieties of piety 
while practising the precepts of atheism, — the linen 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



55 



decencies of behavior contrasting strangely with the 
coarse vices of conduct. Thus Madame de Montes- 
pan, who found it for her interest and vanity to live 
in habitual violation of the Seventh Commandment, 
was so rigorous in her devotions that she weighed 
her bread in Lent. Cardinal Bernis, the most worth- 
less 'of abbes, owed his advancement in the Church to 
Madame de Pompadour, the most worthless of women, 
and then refused " to communicate in the dignity of 
the purple with a woman of so unsanctimonious a 
character." Next there is the perverted ingenuity by 
w 7 hich creeds are spangled all over with, crotchets, 
and the Bible made the basis for conceits as subtle 
as Cowley's and as ridiculous as Sprat's. Who first 
doubled the Cape of Good Hope ? Vasco da Gama, 
you will answer. " No," replies Vieyra, a priest 
of Portugal; "one man passed it before he did." 
"Who?" "Jonah in the whale's belly!" The 
whale, it seems, from'the account of this all-knowing 
geographer, " went out of the Mediterranean, because 
he had no other course ; kept the coast of Africa on 
the left, scoured along Ethiopia, on the shores of 
'Nineveh, and making his tongue serve as a paddle, 
landed the Prophet there." Next, there is the capri- 
cious suspension of the damnatory clauses of a creed, 
out of respect to eminent individuals, who can give 



56 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



benefices if they cannot practise duties. Kings have 
immensely profited by this ecclesiastical urbanity, 
having been allowed to pass sweetly from riot and 
rapine in this world to rest and reward in the next. 
"Louis the well-beloved," said the priest who an- 
nounced the death of Louis the Fifteenth, " sleeps in 
the Lord." "If such a mass of laziness and lust," 
growls Carlyle, in reply, " sleep in the Lord, who, 
think you, sleeps elsewmere ? " 

But the most ordinary source of the impious piety 
and irreverent veneration of eccentric religionists is 
the substitution of an idolatry of self for the wor- 
ship of God, the individual projecting his own opin- 
ions and passions into the texts of Scripture and the 
government of the universe, and thus making a Su- 
preme Being out of the colossal exaggerations of 
self-will. Under the impulse of a ravenous egoism, 
Nature and the Bible are converted into an immense 
magnifying-glass of his own personality, and the Deity 
with him is but an infinite reflection of himself. Such 
is ever the tendency and process of fanaticism, and 
therefore it is that so many gods are often worshipped 
in one Church. We often smile at the last excess 
of pagan despotism, the demand of tyrants that divine 
honors shall be paid to them ; but the same claim is 
now often urged by little tyrants, who, having divi- 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



57 



nized their stupidity, inhumanity, or malignity, strut 
about in quite a furious fashion at their divinity 
being disallowed, flinging the fussy thunderbolts of 
their impotent wrath with the air of Joves and the 
strength of pygmies ! What, think you, would these 
gentlemen do in case they possessed arbitrary power ? 
If the imagination breaks down in the attempt to 
conceive their possible enormities, the history of re- 
ligious persecution will be of essential aid in filling 
up the gaps and enlarging the scope of the most 
fertile and wide-wandering fancy. The cant of our 
day, which resents all attempts to analyze bad opin- 
ions down to their roots in bad dispositions, is prone 
to dismiss the great theological criminals of history 
with the smooth remark that they were sincere in 
their Satanic inhumanities. They used the rack and 
the hot iron, — they maimed, tormented, gibbeted, 
burned, beheaded, crucified, it is true ; but then they 
practised these little diablerie from a sincere sense 
of duty ! Sincere, indeed ! To be sure they were sin- 
cere. They acted honestly and directly from their 
characters. Their thoughts, feelings, deeds, — all were 
of a piece. But out of what interior hell must such 
devil's notions of duty and Deity have sprung? 
How much better it would be to strike at the heart 
of the matter, and acknowledge at once, in the sharp, 
3* 



58 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



incisive sarcasm of Bishop "Warburton, that these 
men acted thus because "they made God after man's 
image, and took the worst possible models at that, — 
themselves." 

If human life, in so many departments of thought 
and action, thus sparkles or glares with eccentric 
characters, it is evident that they must occupy a 
large space in the world's representative literature. 
Indeed, from Aristophanes down to Thackeray, genius, 
though often itself bristling with eccentricities, has 
been quick to discern, and cunning to embody, the 
eccentricities of others. The representation has been 
scornful or genial according as wit or humor has 
predominated in the observing mind. In a majority 
of cases, however, the whims, caprices, crotchets, rul- 
ing passions, intrusive egotisms, which make their 
possessors butts or bores to common sense, are by the 
man of mirthful genius so brightened, interpreted, 
softened, and humanized, and made to glide into such 
ludicrous forms of grotesque character, that they are 
converted into attractive boon companions in the fes- 
tivities of mind. Two great writers in English liter- 
ature, Shakespeare and Scott, have been pre-eminently 
successful in this embodiment of eccentric character, 
Shakespeare individualizing its various kinds, Scott 
imitating its individual specimens. Lower in the 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



59 



scale, and widely differing in their manner, are Ben 
Jonson, Vanbrugh, Fielding, Smollett, Miss Burney, 
Thackeray, Dickens. The author of " Tristram Shan- 
dy" occupies in literature a delicious and original 
little world of his own, answering to the quaint 
craze in the fine creative genius of Laurence Sterne. 
Addison, another original, has made oddities the ob- 
jects of affection by insinuating into them the shy 
humanities of his beneficent humor ; and in Sir Roger 
de Coverley has clothed eccentricity with innocence 
and sanctified it with love, while he has made it 
touch and unseal those fountains of merriment which 
sleep in the innermost recesses of the heart. Our 
own Irving, who felt the attraction of Addison's 
beautiful reserve while in the act of rushing off him- 
self into caricature, commenced his career by welcom- 
ing the broader outlines of eccentricity with riotous, 
roaring laughter, and ended with surveying its finer 
shades with a demure smile. Goldsmith, again, half 
lovingly, half-laughingly, pictures forth foibles of 
vanity, and caprices of benevolence, and amiable lit- 
tle crotchets of understanding, which he discerns peep- 
ing slyly out from corners and crevices of his own 
busy brain. You can almost hear and see these wits 
and humorists through the expressive movement of 
their respective styles. Steele titters as he delineates. 



60 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



Dryden chuckles, Swift scowls, Pope hisses, a*, in wit 
which is to provoke the mirth of millions, they endow 
some dunce with the immortality of contempt. And 
then the more genial and subtle of the humorists 
have such an art in allowing character to develop 
itself! The folly, or erratic disposition, or queer twist 
of mind or morals, seems to leak out unwittingly, to 
escape unawares. The man is self-exposed without 
being himself conscious of exposure, and goes on 
claiming your interest or pity in words which excite 
your mirth or scorn. It is like Captain Rcok's at- 
tempt to rouse the sympathy of his fashionable iriends 
for his losses at the gaming-table. " I lost," he says, 
"four thousand pounds last night, and the worst of 
it is, five pounds were in cash." 

In these writers, however, eccentricity is viewed 
more or less didactically or dramatically. There aie 
others whose eccentricities are personal, and shape 
and color all they see and describe. Such are Ful 
ler, Burton, and Sir Thomas Browne. But perhaps 
the most delightful and popular of this class is Charles 
Lamb, — a man cosJy domesticated by the heart's 
fireside of his readers. Such wit, such humor, such 
imagination, such intelligence, such sentiment, such 
kindliness, such heroism, all so quaintly mixed and 
mingled, and stuttering out in so freakish a fashion, 



ECCENTEIC CHARACTER. 



61 



and all blending so finely in that exquisite eccentric 
something which we call the character of Charles 
Lamb, make him the most lovable of writers and 
men. His essays, the gossip of creative genius, are 
of a piece with the records of his life and conversa- 
tion. Whether saluting his copy of Chapman's " Ho- 
mer " with a kiss, — or saying a grace before reading 
Milton, — or going to the theatre to see his own farce 
acted, and joining in the hisses of the pit when it 
fails, — or sagely wondering if the Ogles of Somerset 
are not descendants of King Lear, — or telling Bar- 
ry Cornwall not to invite a lugubrious gentleman to 
dinner because his face would cast a damp over a 
funeral, — or giving as a reason , why he did not leave 
off smoking, the difficulty of finding an equivalent 
vice, — or striking into a hot controversy between 
Coleridge and Holcroft, as to whether man as he is, 
or man as he is to be, is preferable, and settling the 
dispute by saying, u Give me man as he is not to 
be," — or doing some deed of kindness and love with 
tears in his eyes and a pun on his lips, — he is al- 
ways the same dear, strange, delightful companion and 
friend. He is never — the rogue — without a scrap 
of logic to astound common sense. u Mr. Lamb," 
says the head clerk at the India House, "you come 
down very late in the morning ! " " Yes, sir," Mr 



62 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



Lamb replies, "but then you know T go home very- 
early in the afternoon. " And then with what hu- 
morous extravagance he expresses his peevishness at 
being confined to such work, — with curious ingenuity 
running his malediction on commerce along all its 
lines of influence. " Confusion blast all mercantile 
transactions, all traffic, exchange of commodities, in- 
tercourse between nations, all the consequent civiliza- 
tion, and wealth, and amity, and link of society, and 
getting rid of prejudices, and knowledge of the face 
of the globe; and rot all the firs of the forest, that 
look so romantic alive, and die into desks." It is 
impossible to cheat this frolicsome humorist with any 
pretence, any exaggerated sentiment, any of the do- 
me-goodisms of well-meaning moral feebleness. A lady 
sends him " Coelebs in Search of a Wife," for his pe- 
rusal and guidance. He returns it with this quatrain 
written on a fly-leaf, expressing the slight disagree- 
ment between his views of matrimony and those en- 
tertained by Miss Hannah More: — 

" If ever I marry a wife, 

I'll marry a landlord's daughter, 
And sit in the bar all day, 

And drink cold brandy and water." 

If he thus slips out of controversy by making the 
broadest absurdities the vehicles of the finest insight, 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



63 



his sense and enjoyment of absurdities in others rises 
to rapture. The nonsensical ingenuity of the pam- 
phlet in which his friend Capel LofFt took the ground 
that Napoleon, while in the hands of the English, 
might sue out a writ of habeas corpus, threw him into 
ecsta.-ies. And not only has he quips and quirks and 
twisted words for all he sees and feels, but he has 
the pleasantest art of making his very maladies in- 
teresting by transmuting them into jests. Out of the 
darkest depths of the " dismals " fly some of his hap- 
piest conceits. " My bedfellows," he writes to Words- 
worth, " are cough and cramp. We sleep three in a 
bed." " How is it," he says, " that I cannot get rid 
of this cold ?- It can't be from a lack of care. I have 
studiously been out all these rainy nights until twelve 
o'clock, have had my feet wet constantly, drank co- 
piously of brandy to allay inflammation, and done 
everything else to cure it, and yet it won't depart," 
— a sage decision, worthy of that illustrious physi- 
cian who told his patient that, if he had no serious 
drawbacks, he would probably be worse in a week. 
To crown all, and to make the character perfect in 
its winning contradictions, there beats beneath the 
fantastic covering and incalculable caprices of the 
humorist the best heart in the world, capable of cour- , 
tesy, of friendship, of love, of heroic self-devotion, and 
unostentatious self-sacrifice. 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



In this desultory survey of some of the expressions 
of eccentric character in social life, in politics, in re- 
ligion, in literature, we have aimed to exhibit eccen- 
tricity in its principles as far as so slippery, elastic, 
and elusive a quality will consent to submit itself to 
the limits of definition. We have endeavored to show 
that it is a deviation from reason and common sense 
for the gratification of self-will or the indulgence of 
some original craze in the faculties, and that this de- 
viation tends to levity or malignity according as the 
nature is sweet or savage. We have seen that, airy, 
innocent, and sportive as it may be in the whims of 
beautiful natures, it has often led to follies so gross, 
and crimes so enormous, that their actors seem to 
have escaped from their humanity into brutes or de- 
mons. And in this slight view of the morbid phe- 
nomena of human nature we cannot fail to see how 
important is that pressure on the individual of insti- 
tutions and other minds to keep his caprices in check, 
and educate and discipline him into reason and use- 
fulness, and what a poor mad creature a man is 
likely to become when this pressure is removed. 
Freedom no less than order is the product of inward 
or outward restraint ; and that large and liberal dis- 
course of intelligence w r hich thinks into the meaning 
of institutions, and enters into communion with other 



ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 



65 



mind.-, — which is glad to believe that the reason of 
the race through sixty centuries of gradual develop- 
ment carries with it more authority than some wild 
freak or flash of its own conceit, — this it is which 
emancipates man from egotism, passion, and folly ; 
which puts into his will the fine instinct of wisdom ; 
which makes him tolerant as well as earnest, and 
merciful as well as just ; which connects his thoughts 
with things, and opens a passage for them into the 
common consciousness of men; and which, chaining 
impulse to liberate intelligence, and rounding in ec- 
centricity with the restraints of reason, enlarges his 
intellect only to inform his conscience, doubles his 
power by giving it a right direction, and purifies his 
nature from vanity and self-will, to bind him, in the 
beneficent bonds of a common sympathy and a com- 
mon sense, to the rights, interests, and advancement 
of a common humanity. 



ni. 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 

HHE desire, the duty, the necessity of the age 



in which we live is education, or that culture 
which develops, enlarges, and enriches each individ- 
ual intelligence, according to the measure of its ca- 
pacity, by familiarizing it with the facts and laws of 
nature and human life. But, in this rage for infor- 
mation, we too often overlook the mental constitution 
of the being we would inform, — detaching the ap- 
prehensive from the active powers, weakening char- 
acter by overloading memory, and reaping a harvest 
of imbeciles after we may nave flattered ourselves 
we had sown a crop of geniuses. No person can be 
called educated, until he has organized his knowledge 
into faculty, and can wield it as a weapon. We 
purpose, therefore, to invite the attention of our read- 
ers to some remarks on Intellectual Character, the 
last and highest result of intellectual education, and 
the indispensable condition of intellectual success. 
It is evident, that, when a young man leaves his 




INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



67 



school or college to lake his place in the world, it 
is indispensable that he be something as well as know 
something; and it will require but little experience 
to demonstrate to him that what he really knows is 
little more than what he really is, and that his pro- 
gress in intellectual manhood is not more determined 
by the information he retains, than by that portion 
which, by a benign provision of Providence, he is 
enabled to forget. Youth, to be sure, is his, — youth, 
in virtue of which he is free of the universe, — youth, 
w 7 ith its elastic vigor, its far-darting hopes, its gener- 
ous impatience of prudent meanness, its grand denial 
of instituted falsehood, its beautiful contempt of ac- 
credited baseness, — but youth which must now con- 
centrate its wayward energies, which must discourse 
with facts and grapple with men, and, through strife 
and struggle, and the sad wisdom of experience, must 
pass from the vague delights of generous impulses 
to the assured joy of manly principles. The moment 
he comes in contact with the stern and stubborn re- 
alities which frown on his entrance into practical life, 
he will find that power is the soul of knowledge, and 
character the condition* of intelligence. He will dis- 
cover that intellectual success depends primarily on 
qualities which are not strictly intellectual, but per- 
sonal and constitutional. The test of success is in- 



68 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



fluence, — that is, the power of shaping events by 
informing, guiding, animating, controlling other minds. 
Whether this influence be exerted directly in the 
world of practical affairs, or indirectly in .the world 
of ideas, its fundamental condition is still force of in- 
dividual being, and the amount of influence is the 
measure of the degree of force, just as an effect 
measures a cause. The characteristic of intellect is 
insight, — insight into things and their relations ; but 
then this insight is intense or languid, clear or con- 
fused, comprehensive or narrow, exactly in proportion 
to the weight and power of the individual who sees 
and combines. It is not so much the intellect that 
makes the man, as the man the intellect ; in every 
act of earnest thinking, the reach of the thought 
depends on the pressure of the will ; and we would 
therefore emphasize and enforce, as the primitive re- 
quirement of intellectual success, that discipline of 
the individual which develops dim tendencies into 
positive sentiments, sentiments into ideas, and ideas 
into abilities, — that discipline by which intellect is 
penetrated through and through with the qualities of 
manhood, and endowed with arms as well as eyes. 
This is Intellectual Character. 

Now it should be thundered in the ears of every 
young man who has passed through that course of 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



69 



instruction ironically styled education, 4 - What do you 
intend to be, and what do you intend to do ? Do 
you purpose to play at living, or do you purpose to 
live? — to be a memory, a word-cistern, a feeble 
prater on illustrious themes, one of the world's thou- 
sand chatterers, or a will, a power, a man ? No 
varnish and veneer of scholarship, no command of 
the tricks of logic and rhetoric, can ever make you 
a positive force in the world. Look around you in 
the community of educated men, and see how many, 
who started on their career with minds as bright and 
eager, and hearts as hopeful as yours, have been 
mysteriously arrested in their growth, — have lost all 
the kindling sentiments which glorified their youthful 
studies, and dwindled into complacent echoes of sur- 
rounding mediocrity, — have begun, indeed, to die on 
the very threshold of manhood, and stand in society 
as tombs rather than temples of immortal souls. See, 
too, the wide disconnection between knowledge and 
life ; heaps of information piled upon little heads ; 
everybody speaking, — few who have earned the 
right to speak ; maxims enough to regenerate a uni- 
verse, — a woful lack of great hearts, in which rea- 
son, right, and truth, regal and militant, are fortified 
and encamped ! Now this disposition to skulk the 
austere requirements of intellectual growth in an in 



70 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



dolent surrender of the mind's power of .self-direction 
must be overcome at the outset, or, in spite of your 
grand generalities, you will be at the mercy of every 
bullying lie, and strike your colors to every mean 
truism, and shape your life in accordance with every 
low motive, which the strength of genuine wickedness 
or genuine stupidity can bring to bear upon you ! " 
There is no escape from slavery, or the mere pre- 
tence of freedom, but in radical individual power ; 
and all solid intellectual culture is simply the right 
development of individuality into its true intellectual 
form. 

And first, at the risk of being considered meta- 
physical, — though we fear no metaphysician would' 
indorse the charge, — let us define what we mean by 
individuality ; for the word is commonly made to sig- 
nify some peculiarity or eccentricity, some unreason- 
able twist, of mind or disposition. An individual, 
then-, in the sense in which we use the term, is a 
causative spiritual force, whose root and being are in 
eternity, but who lives, grows, and builds up his na- 
ture in time. All the objects of sense and thought, 
all facts and ideas, all things, are external • to his 
essential personality. But he has, bound up in his 
personal being, sympathies and capacities which ally 
him with external objects, and enable him to trans- 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



71 



mute their inner spirit and substance into his own 
personal life. The process of his growth, therefore, 
is a development of power from within to assimilate 
objects from without, the power increasing with every 
vital exercise of it. The result of this assimilation 
is character. Character is the spiritual body of the 
person, and represents the individualization of vital 
experience, the conversion of unconscious things into 
self-conscious men. Sir Thomas Browne, in quaint 
reference to the building up of our physical frame 
through the food we eat, declares that we have all 
been on our own trenchers; and so, on the same 
principle, our spiritual faculties can be analyzed into 
impersonal facts and ideas, whose life and substance 
we have converted into personal reason, imagination, 
and passion. The fundamental characteristic of man 
is spiritual hunger ; the universe of thought and mat- 
ter is spiritual food. He feeds on Nature ; he feeds 
on ideas ; he feeds, through art, science, literature, 
and history, on the acts and thoughts of other minds ; * 
and could we take the mightiest thinker that ever 
awed and controlled the world, and unravel his pow- 
ers, and return their constituent particles to the mul- 
titudinous objects whence they were derived, the last 
probe of our analysis, after we had stripped him of 
all his faculties, would touch that unquenchable fiery 



72 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



atom of personality which had organized round itself 
such a colossal body of mind, and which, in its sim- 
ple naked energy, would still be capable of rehabili- 
tating itself in the powers and passions of which it 
had been shorn. 

It results from this doctrine of the mind's growth, 
that success in all the departments of life, over which 
intellect holds dominion, depends, not merely on an 
outside knowledge of the facts and laws connected 
with each department, but on the assimilation of that 
knowledge into instinctive intelligence and - active 
power. Take the good farmer, and you will find that 
ideas in him are endowed with will, and can work. 
Take the good general, and you will find that the 
principles of his profession are inwrought into the 
substance of his nature, and act with the velocity of 
instincts. Take the good judge, and in him jurispru- 
dence seems impersonated, and his opinions are au- 
thorities. Take the good merchant, and you will find 
that commerce, in its facts and laws, seems in him 
embodied, and that his sagacity appears identical with 
the objects on which it is exercised. Take the great 
statesman, take Webster, and note how, by thorough- 
ly individualizing his comprehensive experience, he 
seems to carry a nation in his brain ; how, in all 
that relates to the matter in hand, he has in him as 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



73 



faculty what is out of him in fact; how between the 
man and the thing there occurs that subtile free-ma- 
sonry of recognition which we call the mind's in- 
tuitive glance ; and how conflicting principles and 
statements, mixed and mingling in fierce confusion 
and with deafening war-cries, fall into order and re- 
lation, and move in the direction of one inexorable 
controlling idea, the moment they are grasped by 
an intellect which is in the secret of their combina- 
tion : — 

" Confusion hears his voice, and the wild uproar stills." 

Mark, too, how, in the productions of his mind, the 
presence and pressure of his whole nature, in each 
intellectual act, keep his opinions on the level of his 
character, and stamps every weighty paragraph with 
" Daniel Webster, his mark." The characteristic of 
all his great speeches is, that the statements, argu- 
ments, and images have what we should call a posi- 
tive being of their own, — stand out as plainly to the 
sight as a ledge of rocks or chain of hills, - — and, like 
the works of Nature herself, need no other justifica- 
tion of their right to exist than the fact of their ex- 
istence. We may dislike their object, but we cannot 
deny their solidity of organization. This power of 
giving a substantial body, an undeniable external 
4 



74 



INTELLECTUAL CHABACTER. 



shape and form, to his thoughts and perceptions, so 
that the toiling mind does not so much seem to pass 
from one sentence to another, unfolding its leading 
idea, as to make each sentence a solid work in a 
Torres -Vedras line of fortifications, — this prodigious 
constructive faculty, wielded with the strength of a 
huge .Samson-like artificer in the material of mind, 
and welding together the substances it may not be 
able to fuse, puzzled all opponents who understood 
it not, and baffled the efforts of all who understood 
it well. He rarely took a position on any political 
question, which did not draw down upon him a whole 
battalion of adversaries, with ingenious array of ar- 
gument and infinite noise of declamation ; but after 
the smoke and dust and clamor of the combat were 
over, the speech loomed up perfect and whole, a per- 
manent thing in history or literature, while the loud 
thunders of opposition had too often died away into 
low mutterings, audible only to the adventurous anti- 
quary who gropes in the " still air " of stale " Con- 
gressional Debates." The rhetoric of sentences how- 
ever melodious, of aphorisms however pointed, of ab- 
stractions however true, cannot stand in the storm of 
affairs against this true rhetoric, in which thought is 
consubstantiated with things. 

Now in men of this stamp, who have so organized 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



75 



knowledge into faculty that they have attained the 
power of giving Thought the character of Fact, we 
notice no distinction between power of intellect and 
power of will, but an indissoluble union and fusion 
of force and insight. Facts and laws are so blended 
with their personal being, that we can hardly decide 
whether it is thought that wills, or will that thinks. 
Their actions display the intensest intelligence ; their 
thoughts come from them clothed in the thews and 
sinews of energetic volition. Their force, being pro- 
portioned to their intelligence, never issues in that 
wild and anarchical impulse, or that tough, obstinate, 
narrow wilfulness, which many take to be the char- 
acteristic of individualized power. They may, in fact, 
exhibit no striking individual traits w T hich stand im- 
pertinently prominent, and yet from this very cause 
be all the more potent and influential individualities. 
Indeed, in the highest efforts of ecstatic action, when 
the person is mightiest, and amazes us by the giant 
leaps of his intuition, the mere peculiarities of his 
personality are unseen and unfelt. This is the case 
with Homer, Shakespeare, and Goethe, in poetry, — 
with Plato and Bacon, in philosophy, — with Newton, 
in science, — with Csesar, in war. Such men doubt- 
less had peculiarities and caprices, but they were 
" burnt and purged away " by the fire of their genius, 



76 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



when its action was intensest. Then their whole 
natures were melted clown into pure force and insight, 
and the impression they leave upon the mind is the 
impression of marvellous force and weight and reach 
of thought. 

If it be objected, that these high examples are fit- 
ted to provoke despair rather than stimulate emulation, 
the answer is, that they contain, exemplify, and em- 
phasize the principles, and flash subtile hints of th< 
processes, of all mental growth and production. How 
comes it that these men's thoughts radiate from them 
as acts, endowed not only with an illuminating, but 
a penetrating and animating power ? The answer to 
this is a statement of the genesis, not merely of gen- 
ius, but of every form of intellectual manhood ; for 
such thoughts do not leap, a la Minerva, full-grown 
from the head, but are struck off in those moments 
when the whole nature of the thinker is alive and 
aglow with an inspiration kindled long before in re- 
mote recesses of consciousness from one spark of im- 
mortal fire, and unweariedly burning, burning, burning, 
until it lit up the whole inert mass of surrounding 
mini in flame. 

To show, indeed, how little there is of the off- 
hand, the haphazard, the hit-or-miss, in the character 
of creative thought, and how completely the gladdest 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



77 



inspiration is earned, let us glance at the psychologi- 
cal history of one of those imperial ideas which 
measure the power, test the quality, and convey the 
life, of the minds that conceive them. The progress 
of such an idea is from film to form. It has its 
origin in an atmosphere of feeling ; for the first vital 
movement of the mind is emotional, and is expressed 
in a dim tendency, a feeble feeling after the object, 
or the class of objects, related to the peculiar consti- 
tution and latent affinities of its individual being. 
This tendency gradually condenses and deepens into 
a sentiment, pervading the man with a love of those 
objects, — by a sweet compulsion ordering his ener- 
gies in their direction, — and by slow degrees invest- 
ing them, through a process of imagination, with the 
attribute of beauty, and, through a process of reason, 
investing the purpose with which he pursues them 
with the attribute of intelligence. The object dilates 
as the mind assimilates and the nature moves, so that 
every step in this advance from mere emotion to 
vivid insight is a building up of the faculties which 
each onward movement evokes and exercises, — sen- 
timent, imagination, reason increasing their power and 
enlarging their scope with each impetus that speeds 
them on to their bright and beckoning goal. Then, 
when the individual has reached his full mental stat- 



78 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



ure, and come in direct contact with the object, then, 
only then, does he "pluck out the heart of its mys- 
tery" in one of those lightning-like acts of thought 
which we call combination, invention, discovery. There 
is no luck, no accident, in all this. Nature does not 
capriciously scatter her secrets as golden gifts to lazy 
pets and luxurious darlings, but imposes tasks when 
she presents opportunities, and uplifts him whom she 
would inform. The apple that she drops at the feet 
of Newton is but a coy invitation to follow her to 
the stars. 

Now this living process of developing manhood and 
building up mind, while the person is on the trail of 
a definite object of intelligence, is in continual dan- 
ger of being devitalized into a formal process of mere 
acquisition, which, though it may make students 
prodigies of memory, will be sure to leave them lit- 
tle men. Their thoughts will be the attaches, not the 
offspring, of their minds. They will have a bowing 
acquaintance with many truths, without being admitted 
to the familiarity of embracing or shaking hands with 
one. If they have native stamina of animal consti- 
tution, they may become men of passions and opinions, 
but they never will become men of sentiments and 
ideas ; they may know the truth as it is about a thing, 
and support it with acrid and wrangling dogmatism, 



V 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 79 

but they never will know the truth as it is in the 
thing, and support it with faith and insight. And the 
moment they come into collision with a really live 
man, they will find their souls inwardly wither, and 
their boasted acquisitions fall away, before one glance 
of his irradiating intelligence and one stroke of his 
smiting will. If, on the contrary, they are guided 
by good or great sentiments, which are the souls of 
good or great ideas, these sentiments will be sure to 
organize all the capacity there is in them into posi- 
tive intellectual character ; but let them once divorce 
love from their occupations in life, and they will find 
that labor will degenerate into drudgery, and drudg- 
ery will weaken the power to labor, and weakness, as 
a last resort, will intrench itself in pretence and de- 
ception. If they are in the learned professions, they 
will become tricksters in law, quacks in medicine, for- 
malists in divinity, though regular practitioners in all ; 
and clients will be cheated, and patients will be poi- 
soned, and parishioners will be — we dare not say 
what ! — though all the colleges in the universe had 
showered on them their diplomas. " To be weak is 
miserable " : Milton wrested that secret from the Devil 
himself! — but what shall we say of those whose 
weakness has subsided from misery into complacency, 
and who feel all the moral might of their being hour^ 



80 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



ly rust and decay, with the most amiable indifference 
and lazy content with dissolution ? 

Now this weakness is a mental and moral sickness, 
pointing the way to mental and moral death. It has 
its source in a violation of that law which makes the 
health of the mind depend on its activity being di- 
rected to an object. TVhen directed on itself, it be- 
comes fitful and mcody; and moodiness generates 
morbidness, and morbidness misanthropy, and misan- 
thropy self-contempt, and self-contempt begins the 
work of self-dissolution. Why, every sensible man 
will despise himself, -if he concentrates his attention 
on that important personage ! The joy and confi- 
dence of activity come from its being fixed and fast- 
ened on things external to itself. " The human 
heart," says Luther, — and we can apply the remark 
as well to the human mind, — " is like a millstone in 
a mill ; when you put wheat under it, it turns, and 
grinds, and bruises the wheat into flour ; if you put 
no wheat in, it still grinds on, but then it is itself it 
grinds, and slowly wears away." Now activity for 
an object, which is an activity that constantly in- 
creases the power of acting, and keeps the mind glad, 
fresh, vigorous, and young, has three deadly enemies, 
— intellectual indolence, intellectual conceit, and in- 
tellectual fear. We will say a few words on the 
operation of this triad of malignants. 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



81 



Montaigne reladfe that, while once walking in the 
fields, he was accosted by a beggar of Herculean 
frame, who solicited alms. "Are you not ashamed 
to beg ? " said the philosopher, with a frown, — 
" you who are so palpably able to work ? " " O, 
sir," was the sturdy knave's drawling rejoinder, " if 
you only knew how lazy I am!" Herein is the whole 
philosophy of idleness ; and we are afraid that many 
a student of good natural capacity slips and slides 
from thought into revery, and from revery into ap- 
athy, and from apathy into incurable indisposition to 
think, with as much sweet unconsciousness of degra- 
dation as Montaigne's mendicant evinced ; and at last 
hides from himself the fact of his imbecility of action, 
somewhat as Sir James Herring accounted for the 
fact that he could not rise early in the morning: 
he could, he said, make up his mind to it, but could 
not make up his body. 

" He who eats with the Devil," says the proverb, 
" has need of a long spoon " ; and he who domesti- 
cates this pleasant vice of indolence, and allows it to 
nestle near his will, has need of a long head. Or- 
dinary minds may well be watchful of its insidious 
approaches when great ones have mourned over its 
enfeebling effects ; and the subtle indolence that stole 

4 

over the powers of Mackintosh, and gradually im- 



82 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



paired the productiveness even of.^oethe, may well 
scare intellects of less natural grasp, and imaginations 
of less instinctive creativeness. Every step, indeed, 
of the student's progress calls for energy and effort, 
and every step is beset by some soft temptation to 
abandon the task of developing power for the de- 
light of following impulse. The appetites, for exam- 
ple, instead of being bitted, and bridled, and trained 
into passions, and sent through the intellect to quick 
en, sharpen, and intensify its activity, are allowed to 
take their way unmolested to their own objects of 
sense, and drag the mind down to their own sensual 
level. Sentiment decays, the vision fades, faith in 
principles departs, the moment that appetite rules. 
On the closing doors of that "sensual stye," as over 
the gate of Dante's hell, be it written: "Let those 
who enter here leave hope behind." 

But a more refined operation of this pestilent in- 
dolence is its way of infusing into the mind the delu- 
sive belief that it can attain the objects of activity 
without its exercise. Under this illusion, men expect 
to grow wise, as men who gamble in stocks expect 
to grow rich, — by chance, and not by work. They 
invest in mediocrity in the confident hope that it 
will go many hundred per cent above par; and so 
shocking has been the inflation of the intellectual 



INTELLECTUAL CHABACTER. 



83 



iSanency late years, that this speculation of indo- 
lence sometimes partially succeeds. But a revulsion 
comes, — and then brass has to make a break-neck 
descent to reach its proper level below gold. There 
are others whom indolence deludes by some trash 
about "fits" of inspiration, for whose Heaven-sent 
spasms they are humbly to wait. There is, it seems, 
a lucky thought somewhere in the abyss of possibil- 
ity, which is somehow, at some time, to step out of 
essence into substance, and take up its abode in their 
capacious minds, — dutifully kept unoccupied in order 
that the expected celestial visitor may not be crowded 
for room. Chance is to make them king, and chance 
to crown them without their stir ! There are others 
still, who, while sloth is sapping the primitive energy 
of their natures, expect to scale the fortresses of 
knowledge by leaps and not by ladders, and who 
count on success in such perilous gymnastics, not by 
the discipline of the athlete, but by the dissipation 
of the idler. Indolence, indeed, is never at a loss for 
a smooth lie or delicious sophism to justify inaction, 
and, in our day, has rationalized it into a philosophy 
of the mind, and idealized it into a school of poetry, 
and organized it into a " hospital of incapables." It 
promises you the still ecstasy of a divine repose, 
while it lures you surely down into the vacant dul- 



84 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



ness of inglorious sloth. It provides a primrose path 
to stagnant pools, to an Arcadia of thistles, and a 
Paradise of mud. 

But in a mind of any primitive power, intellectual 
indolence is sure to generate intellectual conceit, — 
a little Jack Horner, that ensconces itself in lazy 
heads, and, while it dwarfs every power to the level 
of its own littleness, keeps vociferating, " What a great 
man am I ! " It is the essential vice of this glib imp 
of the mind, even when it infests large intellects, 
that it puts Nature in the possessive case, — labels 
all its inventions and discoveries " My truth," — and 
moves about the realms of art, science, and letters 
in a constant fear of having its pockets picked. 
Think of a man having vouchsafed to him one of 
those awful glimpses into the mysteries of creation 
which should be received with a shudder of prayer- 
ful joy, and taking the gracious boon with a smirk 
of all-satisfied conceit! One page in what Shake- 
speare calls " Nature's infinite book of secrecy " flies 
a moment open to his eager gaze, and he hears the 
rustling of the myriad leaves as they close and clasp, 
only to make his spirit more abject, his vanity more 
ravenous, his hatred of rivals more rancorous and 
mean. That grand unselfish love of truth, and joy 
in its discovery, by whomsoever made, which charac- 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



85 



terize the true seeker and seer of science and creative 
art, alone can keep the mind alive and alert, alone 
can make the possession of truth a means of elevat- 
ing and purifying the man. 

But if this conceit, in powerful natures, tends to 
belittle character, and eat into and consume the very 
faculties whose successful exercise creates it, its slyly 
insinuated venom works swifter and deadlier on youth 
and inexperience. The ordinary forms of conceit, it 
is true, cannot well flourish in any assemblage of 
young men, whose plain interest it is to undeceive 
all self-deception and quell every insurrection of in- 
dividual vanity, and who soon understand the art of 
burning the nonsense out of an offending brother by 
caustic ridicule and slow-roasting sarcasm. But there 
is danger of mutual deception, springing from a com- 
mon belief in a false but attractive principle of cul- 
ture. The mischief of intellectual conceit in our day 
consists in its arresting mental growth at the start 
by stuffing the mind with the husks of pretentious 
generalities, which, while they impart no vital power 
and convey no real information, give seeming enlarge- 
ment to thought, and represent a seeming opulence 
of knowledge. The deluded student, who picks up 
thes3 ideas in masquerade at the rag-fairs and old- 
clothes shops of . philosophy, thinks* he has the key 



86 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



to all secrets and the solvent of all problems, when 
he really has no experimental knowledge of anything, 
and dwindles all the more for every juiceless, unnu- 
tritious abstraction he devours. Though famished for 
the lack of a morsel of the true mental food of facts 
and ideas, he still swaggeringly despises all relative 
information in his ambition to clutch at absolute truth, 
and accordingly goes directly to ultimates by the short 
cuts of cheap generalities. Why, to be sure, should 
he, who can, Napoleon-like, march straight on to the 
interior capital, submit, Marlborough-like, to the 
drudgery of besieging the frontier fortresses ? Why 
should he, who can throw a girdle of generalization 
round the universe in less than forty minutes, stoop 
to master details? And this easy and sprightly am- 
plitude of understanding, which consists not in includ- 
ing but in excluding all relative facts and principles, 
he calls comprehensiveness ; the mental decrepitude it 
occasions he dignifies with the appellation of repose ; 
and, on the strength of comprehensiveness and repose, 
he is of course qualified to take his seat beside Shake- 
speare, and chat cosily with Bacon, and wink know- 
ingly at Goethe, and startle Leibnitz with a slap on 
the shoulder, — the true Red-Republican sign of liberty 
in manners, equality in power, and fraternity in ideas ! 
These men, to be sure, have a way of saying things 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



87 



which he has not yet caught; but then their wide- 
reachinor thoughts are his as well as theirs. Imitating 

CO o 

the condescension of some contemporary philosophers 
of the Infinite, he graciously accepts Christianity and 
patronizes the idea of Deity, though he gives you to 
understand that he could easily pitch a generalization 
outside of both. And thus, mistaking his slab-sided- 
ness for many-sidedness, and forgetting that there is 
no insight without force to back it, — bedizened in 
conceit and magnificent in littleness, — he is thrown 
on society, walking in a vain show of knowledge, and 
doomed to be upset and trampled on by the first 
brawny concrete Fact he stumbles against. A true 
method of culture makes drudgery beautiful by pre- 
senting a vision of the object to which it leads; — 
beware of the conceit that dispenses with it! How 
much better it is to delve for a little solid knowledge, 
and be sure of that, than to be a proper target for 
such a sarcasm as a great statesman once shot at a 
glib advocate, who was saying nothing with great 
fluency and at great length ! " Who," he asked, " is 
this self-sufficient, all-sufficient, insufficient man ? " 

Idleness and Conceit, however, are not more op- 
posed to that out-springing, reverential activity which 
makes the person forget himself in devotion to his 
objects, than Fear. A bold heart in a sound head, — ■ 



88 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



that is the condition of energetic thinking, of the 
thought that thinks round things, and into things, and 
through things ; but fear freezes activity at its inmost 
fountains. " There is nothing," says Montaigne, " that 
I fear so much as fear." Indeed, an educated man, 
who creeps along with an apologetic air, cringing to 
this name and ducking to that opinion, and hoping 
that it is not too presumptuous in him to beg the right 
to exist, — why, it is a spectacle piteous to gods and 
hateful to men ! Yet think of the many knots of 
monitory truisms in which activity is likely to be 
caught and entangled at the outset, — knots which a 
brave purpose will not waste time to untie, but in- 
stantly cuts. First, there is the nonsense of students 
killing themselves by over-study, — some few instances 
of which, not traceable to over-eating, have shielded 
the shortcomings of a million idlers. Next, there is 
the fear that the intellect may be developed at the 
expense of the moral nature, — one of those truths in 
the abstract which are made to do the office of lies 
in the application, and which are calculated not so 
much to make good men as goodies, — persons re- 
joicing in an equal mediocrity of morals and mind, 
and pertinent examples of the necessity of personal 
force to convert moral maxims into moral might. 
The truth would seem to be, that half the crimes and 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



89 



sufferings which history records and observation fur- 
nishes are directly traceable to want of thought 
rather than to bad intention ; and in regard to the 
other half, which may be referred to the remorseless 
selfishness of unsanctified intelligence, has that selfish- 
ness ever had more valuable allies and tools than the 
mental torpor that cannot think and the conscientious 
stupidity that will not? Moral laws, indeed, are in- 
tellectual facts, to be investigated as well as obeyed ; 
and it is not a blind or blear-eyed conscience, but a 
conscience blended with intelligence and consolidated 
with character, that can both see and act. 

But curtly dismissing the fallacy, that the moral 
and spiritual faculties are likely to find a sound basis 
in a cowed and craven reason, we come to a form 
of fear that practically paralyzes independent thought 
more than any other, while it is incompatible with 
manliness and self-respect. This fear is compounded 
of self-distrust and that mode of vanity which cowers 
beneath the invective of men whose applause it nei- 
ther courts nor values. If you examine critically the 
two raging parties of conservatism and radicalism, you 
will find that a goodly number of their partisans are 
men who have not chosen their position, but have 
been bullied into it, — men who see clearly enough 
that both parties are based on principles almost 



90 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



equally true in themselves, almost equally false by 
being detached from their mutual relations. But then 
each party keeps its professors of intimidation and 
stainers of character, whose business it is to deprive 
men of the luxury of large thinking, and to drive all 
neutrals into their respective ranks. The missiles 
hurled from one side are disorganize^ infidel, disun- 
ionist, despiser of law, and other trumpery of that 
sort ; from the other side, the no less effective ones 
of murderer, dumb dog, traitor to humanity, and oth- 
er trumpery of that sort; and the young and sensi- 
tive student finds it difficult to keep the poise of his 
nature amid the cross-fire of this logic of fury and 
rhetoric of execration, and too often ends in joining 
one party from fear, or the other from the fear of 
being thought afraid. The probability is, that the 
least danger to his mental independence will proceed 
from any apprehension he may entertain of what are 
irreverently styled the " old fogies " ; for if Young 
America goes on at its present headlong rate, there 
is little doubt that the old fogy will have to descend 
from his eminence of place, become an object of 
pathos ra:her than terror, and be compelled to make 
the inquiring appeal to his brisk hunters, so often 
made to himself in vain, u Am I not a man and a 
brother?" But, with whatever association, political 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



91 



or moral, the thinker may connect himself, let him 
go in, and not be dragged in or scared in. He 
certainly can do no good to himself, his country, or 
his race by being the slave and echo of the heads 
of a clique. Besides, as most organizations are con- 
stituted on the principles of a sort of literary social- 
ism, and each member lives and trades on a common 
capital of phrases, there is danger that these phrases 
may decline from signs into substitutes of thought, 
and both intellect and character evaporate in words. 
Thus, a man may be a Union man and a National 
man, or an Anti-Slavery man and a Temperance man 
and a Woman's-Rights man, and still be very little 
of a man. There is, indeed, no more ludicrous sight 
than to see Mediocrity, perched on one of these re- 
sounding adjectives, strut and bluster, and give it- 
self braggadocio airs, and dictate to all quiet men its 
maxims of patriotism or morality, and all the while 
be but a living illustration through what grandeurs 
of opinion essential meanness and poverty of soul 
will peer and peep and be disclosed. To be a states- 
man or reformer requires a courage that dares defy 
dictation from any quarter, and a mind which has 
come in direct contact with the great inspiring ideas 
of country and humanity. All the rest is spite, and 
spleen, and cant, and conceit, and words. 



92 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



It is plain, of course, that every man of large and 
living thought will naturally sympathize with those 
great social movements, informing and reforming, 
which are the glory of the age ; but it must always 
be remembered that the grand and generous senti- 
ments that underlie those movements demand in their 
fervid disciple a corresponding grandeur and generos- 
ity of soul. There is no reason why his philanthropy 
should be malignant because other men's conserva- 
tism may be stupid ; and the vulgar insensibility to 
the rights of the oppressed, and the vulgar scorn of 
the claims of the wretched, which men calling them- 
selves respectable and educated may oppose to his 
own warmer feelings and nobler principles, should be 
met, not with that invective which may be as vulgar 
as the narrowness it denounces, nor always with that 
indignation which is righteous as well as wrathful, 
but with that awful contempt with which Magnanim- 
ity shames meanness, simply by the irony of her 
lofty example and the sarcasm of her terrible si- 
lence. 

In these remarks, which we trust our readers have 
at least been kind enough to consider worthy of an 
effort of patience, we have attempted to connect all 
genuine intellectual success with manliness of charac- 
ter; have endeavored to show that force of individ- 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



93 



ual being is its primary condition ; that this force is 
augmented and enriched, or weakened and impover- 
ished, according as it is or is not directed to ap- 
propriate objects ; that indolence, conceit and fear 
present continual checks to this going out of the 
mind into glad and invigorating communion with facts 
and laws ; and that as a man is not a mere bundle 
of faculties, but a vital person, w T hose unity pervades, 
vivifies, and creates all the varieties of his manifesta- 
tion, the same vices- which enfeeble and deprave 
character tend to enfeeble and deprave intellect. 
But perhaps we have not sufficiently indicated a dis- 
eased state of consciousness, from which most intel- 
lectual men have suffered, many have died, and all 
should be warned, — the disease, namely, of mental dis- 
gust, the sign and the result of mental debility. Men- 
tal disgust "sicklies o'er" all the objects of thought, 
extinguishes faith in exertion, communicates a dull 
wretchedness to indolence in the very process by 
which it makes activity impossible, and drags into its 
own slough of despond, and discolors with its own 
morbid reveries, the objects which it should ardently 
seek and genially assimilate. It sees things neither 
as they are, nor as they are glorified and transfigured 
by hope and health and faith ; but, in the apathy of 
that idling introspection which betrays a genius for 



94 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



misery, it pronounces effort to be vanity, and de- 
spairingly dismisses knowledge as delusion. " De- 
spair," says Donne, " is the damp of hell ; rejoicing 
is the serenity of heaven." 

Now contrast this mental disgust, which proceeds 
from mental debility, with the sunny and soul-lifting 
exhilaration radiated from mental vigor, — a vigor 
which comes from the mind's secret consciousness 
that it is in contact with moral and spiritual verities, 
and is partaking of the rapture of their immortal life. 
A spirit earnest, hopeful, energetic, inquisitive, mak- 
ing its mistakes minister to wisdom, and converting 
the obstacles it vanquishes into power, — a spirit in- 
spired by a love of the excellency and beauty of 
knowledge, which will not let it sleep, — such a spirit 
soon learns that the soul of joy is hid in the austere 
form of Duty, and that the intellect becomes brighter, 
keener, clearer, more buoyant, and more efficient, as 
it feels the freshening vigor infused by her monitions 
and menaces, and the celestial calm imparted by her 
soul-satisfying smile. In all the professions and oc- 
cupations over w r hich Intellect holds dominion, the 
student will find that there is no grace of character 
without its corresponding grace of mind. He will 
find that virtue is an aid to insight; that good and 
sweet affections will bear a harvest of pure and high 



INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 



95 



thoughts; that patience will make the intellect per- 
sistent in plans which benevolence will make benefi- 
cent in results ; that the austerities of conscience will 
dictate precision to statements and exactness to argu- 
ments ; that the same moral sentiments and moral 
power which regulate the conduct of life will illumine 
the path and stimulate the purpose of those daring 
spirits eager to add to the discoveries of truth and 
the creations of art. And he will also find that this 
purifying interaction of spiritual and mental forces will 
give the mind an abiding foundation of joy for its 
starts of rapture and flights of ecstasy ; — a joy in 
whose light and warmth, languor and discontent and 
depression and despair will be charmed away ; — a 
joy, which will make the mind large, generous, 
hopeful, aspiring, in order to make life beautiful and 
sweet ; — a joy, in the words of an old divine, " which 
will put on a more glorious garment above, and be 
joy superin vested in glory!" 



IV. 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



F 1 1HE noblest and most exhilarating objects of 
human contemplation are those which exhibit 
human nature in its exalted aspects. Our hearts 
instinctively throb and burn in sympathy with grand 
thoughts and brave actions radiated from great char- 
acters ; for they give palpable form to ideals of con- 
duct domesticated in all healthy imaginations, and 
fulfil prophecies uttered in the depths of all aspiring 
souls. They are, in fact, what all men feel they ought 
to be. They inspire our weakness by the energy of 
their strength ; they sting our pride by the irony of 
their elevation. Their flights of thought and audaci- 
ties of action, which so provokingly mock our wise 
saws and proper ways, and which seem to cast om- 
inous conjecture on the sanity of their minds, cannot 
blind us to the fact that it is we and not they who 
are unnatural ; that nature, obstructed in. common men, 
twisted into unnatural distortions, and only now and 
then stuttering into ideas, comes out in them freely. 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



97 



harmoniously, sublimely, all hinderances burnt away 
by the hot human heart and flaming human soul 
which glow unconsumed within them. They are, in- 
deed, so filled with the wine of life, so charged with 
the electricity of mind, — they have, in Fletcher's fine 
extravagance, " so much man thrust into them," — that 
manhood must force its way out, and demonstrate its 
innate grandeur and power. 

This indestructible manhood, which thus makes for 
itself a clear and clean path through all impediment?, 
is commonly called Heroism, or genius in action, — 
genius that creatively clothes its ascending thoughts 
in tough thews and sinews, uplifts character to the 
level of ideas, and impassionates soaring imagination 
into settled purpose. The hero, therefore, with his 
intelligence all condensed into will, — compelled to 
think in deeds, and find his language in events, — 
his creative energy spending itself, not in making ep- 
ics, but in making history, — and who thus brings 
his own fiery nature into immediate, invigorating 
contact with the nature of others, without the medi- 
ation of the mist of words, — is, of course, the object 
both of heartier love and of fiercer hatred than those 
men of genius whose threatening thought is removed 
to the safe ideal distance of Art. The mean-minded, 
the little-hearted, and the pusillanimous of soul in- 



98 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



stinctively recognize him as their personal enemy 
are scared and cowed by the swift sweep of his dar- 
will, and wither inwardly as they feel the ominous 
glance of his accusing eyes ; and they accordingly 
intrench themselves and their kind in economic max- 
ims and small bits of detraction, in sneers, suspicions, 
cavils, scandals, in all the defences by which malice 
and stupidity shut out from themselves, and strive to 
shut out from others, the light that streams from a 
great and emancipating nature. We must clear away 
all this brushwood and undergrowth before the hero 
can \>e seen in his full proportions ; and this will 
compel us to sacrifice remorselessly to him that type 
of human character which goes under the name of 
the Sneak. 

The fundamental peculiarity of this antithesis and 
antagonist of the hero is his tendency to skulk and 
evade the requirements of every generous, kindling, 
and exalting sentiment which the human heart con- 
tains. He has, to be sure, a feeble glimmer of 
thought, a hesitating movement of conscience, a sick 
ly perception that he exists as- a soul, and his claim 
to be considered a man must therefore be reluctantly 
admitted; but his soul is so puny, so famine- wasted 
by fasting from the soul's appropriate diet, that he 
knows of its existence only as an invalid knows of 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



the existence of his stomach, — by its qualms. This 
soul, however, is still essentially the soul of a sneak, 
and its chief office appears to be to give malignity to 
his littleness, by weakly urging him to hate all who 
have more. This rancor of his has an inexpressible 
felicity of meanness, which analysis toils after in vain. 
His patriotism, his morality, his religion, his philan- 
thropy, if he pretend to have any of these fine things, 
are all infected with it, lose their nature in its pres- 
ence, and dwindle into petty tributaries of its snarling 
venom and spleen. It is compounded of envy, fear, 
folly, obstinacy, malice, — all of them bad qualities, 
but so modified in him by the extreme limitation of 
his conceptions and the utter poltroonery of his char- 
acter, that we may well hesitate to call them bad. 
He is, indeed, too small a creature to reach even the 
elevation of vice ; and no general term designating a 
sin can be applied to him without doing injustice to the 
dignity of evil and the respectabilities of the Satanic. 

Mean as this poisonous bit of humanity is, he still 
wields a wide influence over opinion by creeping 
stealthily into the recesses of other and larger minds, 
and using their powers to give currency to his sen- 
timents. He thus dictates no inconsiderable portion 
of the biography, criticism, history, politics, and belles 
lettres in general circulation; and, by a cunning 



F. 5.^ 
>/ NOVITIATE ' 

100 HEROIC CHARACTER. 

misuse of the words prudence and practical wisaorn, 
impudently teaches that disinterestedness is selfishness 
in disguise, poetry a sham, heroism craft or insanity, 
religion a convenient lie, and human life a cultivated 
bog. We detect his venomous spirit in all those 
eminent men whose abilities are exercised to degrade 
man and wither up the springs of generous action. 
Thus Dean Swift, in his description of the Yahoos, 
combines the sentiment of the sneak with the faculty 
of the satirist ; Rochefoucauld, in his " Maxims," the 
sentiment of the sneak combined with the faculty of 
the philosopher ; and Voltaire, in his " Pucelle," pre- 
sents a more hideous combination still of sneak and 
poet. 

Having thus ruled out the evidence of this carica- 
ture and caricaturist of humanity against the reality 
of the heroic element in man, we may now proceed 
to its analysis and description. And first, it is ne- 
cessary to state that all vital ideas and purposes have 
their beginning in sentiments. Sentiment is the 
living principle, the soul, of thought and volition, 
determining the direction, giving the impetus, and 
constituting the force, of faculties. Heroism is no 
extempore work of transient impulse, — a rocket rush 
ing fretfully up to disturb the darkness by which, 
after a moment's insulting radiance, it is ruthlessly 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



101 



swallowed up, — but a steady fire, which darts forth 
tongues of flame. It is no sparkling epigram of ac- 
tion, but a luminous epic of character. It first ap- 
pears in the mind as a mysterious but potent senti- 
ment, working below consciousness in the unsounded 
depths of individual being, and giving the nature it 
inhabits a slow, sure, upward tendency to the noble 
and exalted in meditation and action. Growing with 
the celestial nutriment on which it feeds, and gaining 
strength as it grows, it gradually condenses into con- 
scious sentiment. This sentiment then takes the form 
of intelligence in productive ideas, and the form of 
organization in heroic character; so that, at the end, 
heart, intellect, and will are all kindled in one blaze, 
all united in one individuality, and all gush out 
in one purpose. The person thus becomes a living 
soul, thinking and acting with the rapidity of one who 
feels spiritual existence, with the audacity of one who 
obeys spiritual instincts, and with the intelligence of 
one who discerns spiritual laws. There is no break 
or flaw in the connection between the various parts 
of his nature, but a vital unity, in which intellect 
seems to have the force of will, and will the insight 
and foresight of intellect. There is no hesitation, no 
stopping half-way, in the pursuit of his lofty aim, 
partly because, his elevation being the elevation of 



102 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



nature, he is not perched on a dizzy peak of thought, 
but is established on a table-land of character, and 
partly because there plays round the object he seeks 
a light and radiance of such strange, unearthly lustre, 
that his heart, smitten with love for its awful beauty, 
is drawn toward it by an irresistible fascination. 
Disappointment, discouragement, obstacles, drudgery, 
only sting his energies by opposition or are glorified 
to his imagination as steps ; for beyond them and 
through them is the Celestial City of his hopes, 
shining clear to the inner eye of his mind, tempting, 
enticing, urging him on through all impediments, by 
the sweet, attractive force of its visionary charm ! 
The eyes of such men, by the testimony of painters, 
always have the expression of looking into distant 
space. As a result of this unwearied spiritual energy 
and this ecstatic spiritual vision is the courage of the 
hero. He has no fear of death, because the idea of 
death is lost in his intense consciousness of life, — 
full, rich, exulting, joyous, lyrical life, — which ever 
asserts the immortality of mind, because it feels it- 
self immortal, and is scornfully indifferent to that 
drowsy twilight of intellect into which atheism sends 
its unsubstantial spectres, and in which the whole flock 
of fears, terrors, despairs, weaknesses, and doubts 
scatter their enfeebling maxims of misanthropy, and 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



103 



insinuate their ghastly temptations to suicide. One 
ray from a sunlike soul drives them gibbering back 
to their parent darkness ; for 

" Whatever crazy sorrow saith, 
No life that breathes with human breath 
Hath ever truly wished for death. 

"'Tis life of which our nerves are scant, 
life, — not death, —for which we pant, 
More life, and fuller, that we want ! " 

This life of the soul, which is both light and heat, 
intelligence and power, — this swift-ascending instinct 
of the spirit to spiritual ideas and laws, — this bold 
committal of self to something it values more than 
all the interests of self, — attests the presence of the 
heroic element by indicating an ideal standard of 
conduct. Let us now contemplate it in the scale of 
moral precedence, according as it fastens its upward 
glance on the idea of glory, or country, or humanity, 
or heaven. This will lead to a short consideration 
of the hero as a soldier, as a patriot, as a reformer, 
and as a saint. 

In viewing the hero as a soldier, it must be re- 
membered that the first great difficulty in human 
life is to rouse men from the abject dominion of 
selfishness, laziness, sensuality, fear, and other forms 
of physical existence but spiritual death. Fear is 



104 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



the paralysis of the soul ; and nature, preferring an- 
archy to imbecility, lets loose the aggressive passions 
to shake it off. Hence war, which is a rude protest 
of manhood against combining order with slavery, and 
repose with degradation. As long as it is a passion, 
it merely illustrates nature's favorite game of fighting 
one vice with another ; but in noble natures the pas- 
sion becomes consecrated by the heart and imagina- 
tion, acknowledges an ideal aim, and, under the 
inspiration of the sentiment of honor, inflames the 
whole man with a love of the dazzling idea of glory. 
It is this heroic element in war which palliates its 
enormities, humanizes its horrors, and proves the 
combatants to be men, and not tigers and wolves. 
Its grand illusions — fopperies to the philosopher and 
vices to the moralist — are realities to the hero. 
Glory feeds his heart's hunger for immortality, gives 
him a beautiful disdain of fear, puts ecstasy into his 
courage and claps wings to his aspirations, and makes 
the grim battle-field, with its crash of opposing hosts 
and the deafening din of its engines of death, as 
sweet to him 

" As ditties highly penned, 
Sung by a fair queen in a summer's bower, 
With ravishing division, to her lute." 

This splendid fanaticism, while it has infected such 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



105 



fine ai«d pure spirits as Bayard and Sir Philip Sid- 
ney, and thus allied itself with exalted virtues, has 
not altogether denied its hallowing light to men 
stained with Satanic vices. In Hannibal, in Caesar, 
in Wallenstein, in Napoleon, in all commanders of 
gigantic abilities as well as heroic sentiments, and 
whose designs stretch over an extended field of op- 
erations, the idea of glory dilates to the vastness of 
their desires, and is pursued with a ruthlessness of 
intellect which, unchecked by moral principle, is in- 
different to all considerations of truth and humanity 
which block the way to success. The ravenous hun- 
ger for universal dominion which characterizes such 
colossal spirits, though criminal, is still essentially 
ideal, and takes hold of what is immortal in evil. 
Such men are the unhallowed poets and artists of 
action, fiercely impatient to shape the world into the 
form of their imperious conceptions, — like the usurp- 
ing god of the old Greek mythology, who devoured 
all existing natures, and swallowed all the pre-exist- 
ing elements of things, and then produced the world 
anew after the pattern of his own tyrannous ideas. 
But their crimes partake of ihe greatness of their 
characters, and cannot be imitated by ncalefactors of 
a lower grade. 

The courage of the devotee of glorj has in it 

5* 



106 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



element of rapture which resembles the fine frenzy 
of the poet. The hero, indeed, has such prodigious* 
energy and fulness of soul, possesses so quick, keen, 
and burning a sense of life, that when great perils 
call for almost superhuman efforts, he exhibits flashes 
of valor which transcend all bodily limitations ; for he 
feels, in the fury and delirium of imaginative ecstasy, 
as if his body were all ensouled, and, though riddled 
with bullets, would not consent to death. It was 
this sense which made Caesar rush singly on the 
Spanish ranks, and carried Napoleon across the 
Bridge of Lodi. " I saw him," says Demosthenes, in 
speaking of Philip of Macedon, " though covered with 
wounds, his eye struck out, his collar-bone broke, 
maimed, both in hi3 hands and feet, still resolutely 
rush into the midst of dangers, and ready to deliver 
up to Fortune any part of his body she might desire, 
provided he might live honorably and gloriously with 
the rest." It was this sense also that forced out of 
the cold heart of Robespierre the only heroic utter- 
ance of his life. In his last struggle in the Conven- 
tion, surrounded by enemies eager for his blood, and 
his endeavors to speak in his own defence drowned 
by the clamors of the assembly, desperation infused 
eloquence even into him, and he cried out, in a voice 
heard above everything else, " President of Assassins ! 
hear me ! " 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



107 



The hero, also, when his inspiration is a thought, 
has a kind of faith that the blind messengers of 
death hurtling round him will respect him who rep- 
resents in his person the majesty of an idea. " The 
ball that is to hit me," said Napoleon, " has not yet 
been cast " ; and this confidence of great generals in 
a tacit understanding between them and the bullets 
was quaintly expressed by the brave Dessaix in the 
presentiment of death which came over him on the 
morning of the battle of Marengo. "It is a long 
time," he said to one of his aides-de-camp, " since I 
have fought in Europe. The bullets won't know me 
again. Something will happen." 

The audacity and energy of the hero likewise 
stimulate his intelligence, brightening and condensing 
rather than confusing his mind. The alertness, saga- 
city, and coolness of his thinking are never more ap- 
parent than in tho frenzy of conflict. At the terrible^ 
naval battle of the Baltic, Nelson, after the engage- 
ment had lasted four hours, found that an armistice 
was necessary to save his fleet from destruction, and, 
in the heat and din of the cannonade, wrote a letter 
to the Crown Prince of Denmark proposing one. 
Not a minute was to be lost, and an officer hastily 
handed him a wafer to seal it But Nelson called 
for a candle and deliberately sealed it in wax. 



108 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



" This is no time," he said, " to appear hurried and 
informal." Gonsalvo, the great captain, in one of his 
Italian battles, had his powder magazine blown up 
by the enemy's first discharge. His soldiers, smitten 
by sudden panic, paused and turned, but he instantly 
rallied them with the exclamation, " My brave boys, 
the victory is ours ! Heaven tells us by this signal 
that we shall have no further need of our artillery." 
Napoleon was famous for combining daring with 
shrewdness, and was politic even in his fits of rage. 
In desperate circumstances he put on an air of reck- 
less confidence, which cowed the spirits of his adver- 
saries, and almost made them disbelieve the evidence 
of their senses. Thus he induced the Austrian am- 
bassador to commit the folly of signing the treaty of 
Campo Formio, by a furious threat of instant war, 
which, if declared at that time, would probably have 
resulted to Austria's advantage. Seizing a precious 
vase of porcelain, a gift to the ambassador from the 
Empress Catherine, he exclaimed passionately, "The 
die is then cast; the truce broken; war declared. 
But mark my words ! before the end of autumn I will 
break in pieces your monarchy as I now destroy this 
porcelain " ; and, dashing it into fragments, he bowed 
and retired. The treaty was signed the next day. 
But perhaps the grandest example in modern hi* 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



109 



iory of that audacity which combines all the physical, 
civic, and mental elements of courage is found in 
Napoleon's return from Elba, and triumphant pro- 
gress to Paris. The world then beheld the whole 
organization of a monarchy melt away like a piece 
of frost-work in the sun, before a person and a name. 
Every incident in that march is an epical stroke. 
He throws himself unhesitatingly on the Napoleon 
in every man and mass of men he meets, and Napo- 
leonism instinctively recognizes and obeys its master. 
On approaching the regiment at Grenoble, the officers 
in command gave the order to fire. Advancing con- 
fidently, within ten steps of the levelled muskets, 
and baring his breast, he uttered the well-known 
*words, " Soldiers of the Fifth Regiment, if there is 
one among you who would kill his Emperor, let him 
do it ! here I am!" The whole march was worthy 
such a commencement, profound as intelligence, irre- 
sistible as destiny. 

But the test of ascension in heroism is not found 
in faculty, but in the sentiment which directs the 
faculty; the love of glory, therefore, must yield the 
palm in disinterestedness of sentiment to the love of 
country, and the hero as a patriot take precedence 
of the hero as a soldier. 

The great conservative instinct of patriotism is in 



110 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



all vigorous communities, and under its impulse 
whole nations sometimes become heroic. Even its 
prejudices are elements of spiritual strength, and 
most of the philosophic chatterers who pretend to be 
above them are, in reality, below them. Thus the 
old Hollander, who piously attempted to prove that 
Dutch was the language spoken by Adam in Para- 
dise, and the poor Ethiopians, who believed that God 
made their sands and deserts in person, and contempt- 
uously left the rest of the world to be manufactured 
by his angels, were in a more hopeful condition 
of manhood than is the cosmopolitan coxcomb, who, 
from the elevation of a mustache and the comprehen- 
siveness of an imperial, lisps elegant disdain of all 
narrow national peculiarities. The great drawback 
on half the liberality of the world is its too fre- 
quent connection with indifference or feebleness. 
When we apply to men the tests of character, we 
often find that the . amiable gentleman, who is so 
blandly superior to the prejudices of sect and coun- 
try, and who clasps the whole world in the mild 
embrace of his commonplaces, becomes a furious bigot 
when the subject-matter rises to the importance of 
one-and-sixpence, and the practical question is wheth- 
er he or you shall pay it. The revenge of the little 
in soul and the weak in will is to apply to the strong 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



Ill 



in character the tests of criticism ; and then your un- 
mistakable do-nothing can prattle prettily in the pa- 
tois of the giants, and, with a few abstract maxims, 
that any boy can grasp, will smirkingly exhibit to 
you the limitations in thought of such poor creatures 
as Miltiades, Leonidas, Fabius, Scipio, of Wallace, 
Bruce, Tell, Hofer, of Joan of Arc, Henry IV., 
Turgot, Lafayette, of De Witt and William of Or- 
ange, of Grattan, Curran, and Emmett, of Pym, 
Hampden, Russell, Sidney, Marvell, of Washington, 
Adams, Henry, Hamilton, and all the rest of the 
heroes of patriotism. The idea these men represent 
may, doubtless, be easily translated into a truism, and 
this truism be easily overtopped by some truism more 
general ; but their faith, fortitude, self-devotion, their 
impassioned, all-absorbing love of country, are, unhap- 
pily, in the nature of paradoxes. 

Patriotism, indeed, when it rises to the heroic 
standard, is a positive love of country, and it will do 
all and sacrifice all which it is in the nature of love 
to do and to sacrifice for its object. It is heroic on- 
ly when it is lifted to the elevation of the ideal, — 
when it is so hallowed by the affections and glorified 
by the imagination that the whole being of the man 
is thrilled and moved by its inspiration, and drudgery 
becomes beautiful, and suffering noble, and death 



112 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



sweet, in the country's service. No mere intelligent 
regard for a nation's material interests, or pride in 
its extended dominion, is sufficient to constitute a 
patriot hero. It is the sentiment and the idea of 
the country, "felt in his blood and felt along his 
heart " ; it is this which withdraws him from self, and 
identifies him with the nation; which enlarges his 
personality to the grandeur and greatness of the na- 
tional personality ; which makes national thoughts and 
national passions beat and burn in his own heart and 
brain, until at last he feels every wrong done to his 
country as a personal wrong, and every wrong com- 
mitted by his country as a sin for which he is per- 
sonally responsible. Such men are nations individ- 
ualized. They establish magnetic relations with what 
is latent in all classes, command all the signs of that 
subtle freemasonry which brings men into instant 
communion with the people, and are ever impatient 
and dangerous forces in a nation until they reach 
their rightful, predestined position at its head. "As 
in nature," says Bacon, " things move more violent- 
ly to their place and calmly in their place, so vir- 
tue in ambition is violent, in authority settled and 
calm." As long as Chatham is out of office, Eng- 
land must be torn with factions, in his furious endeav- 
ors to upset the. pretenders to statesmanship who 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



113 



occupy the official stations ; but, the moment he is 
minister, the nation comes to self-consciousness in 
him, and acts with the promptitude, energy, and unity 
of a great power. Though his body was shattered 
and worn with illness, his spirit — the true spirit of 
the nation — was felt at once in every department 
of the public service ; timidity, hesitation, intrigue, 
mediocrity, disappeared before his audacious intelli- 
gence ; and India, America, the continent of Europe, 
soon felt the full force of the latent energies of the na- 
tional soul. The word impossible was hateful to Chat- 
ham, as it is to all vigorous natures who recognize 
the latent, the reserved power, in men and nations. 
"Never let me hear that foolish word again," said 
Mirabeau. " Impossible ! — it is not good French," 
said Napoleon. My Lord Anson, at the Admiralty, 
sends word to Chatham, then confined to his chamber 
by one of his most violent attacks of the gout, that 
it is impossible for him to fit out a naval expedition 
within the period to which he is limited. "Impossi- 
ble!" cried Chatham, glaring at the messenger; "who 
talks to me of impossibilities ? " Then starting to 
his feet, and forcing out great drops of agony on his 
brow with the excruciating torment of the effort, he 
exclaimed, "Tell Lord Anson that he serve s under a 
minister who treads on impossibilities ! " One of his 

H 



114 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



contemporaries calls all this ranting. " Lord Chat- 
ham's rants," he says, " are amazing." But a states- 
man who indulged in such fine rants as Quebec and 
Minden, who ranted France out of Germany, Amer- 
ica, and India, and ranted England into a power 
of the first class, is a ranter infinitely to be pre- 
ferred to those cool and tasteful politicians who ruin 
the countries they govern with so much decorous 
duncery and grave and dignified feebleness. 

Patriotism, to the patriot hero, does not consist m 
aiding the government of his country in every basfc 
or stupid act it may perform, but rather in paralyz- 
ing its power when it violates vested rights, affronts 
instituted justice, and assumes undelegated authority. 
Accordingly, Chatham, the type of the patriot, but 
whose patriotism comprehended the whole British 
empire, put forth the full force and frenzy of his 
genius and passions against the administrations who 
taxed America ; gloried, as an English patriot, in the 
armed resistance of the Colonies; gave them the ma- 
terial aid and comfort of his splendid fame and over- 
whelming eloquence ; became, in the opinion of all 
little-minded patriots, among whom was King George 
the Third himself, a trumpet of sedition, an enemy 
to his country ; and, with the grand audacity of his 
character, organized an opposition, so strong in rea- 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



115 



©on and moral power, and so uncompromising in its 
attitude, that it at least enfeebled the efforts of the gov- 
ernments it could not overturn, and made Lord North 
more than once humorously execrate the memory of 
Columbus for discovering a continent which gave him 
and his ministry so much trouble. Fox and Burke, 
as well as Chatham, viewed the Americans as Eng- 
lish subjects struggling for English legal privileges; 
they would not admit, even after the Colonists had 
revolted, that they were rebels ; and Lord North was 
near the truth, when, interrupted by Fox for using the 
offensive word, he mockingly corrected himself, and 
with an arch look at the Whig benches, called the 
American army and generals, not rebels, but " gentle- 
men of the Opposition over the water." In after years, 
when Fox and Burke had quarrelled, Fox, referring, 
in the House of Commons, to old memories of their 
political friendship, alluded to the time when they had 
mutually wept over the fall of Montgomery, and mu- 
tually rejoiced over a victory by Washington ; and 
one of the noblest passages in literature is the mem- 
orable sentence with which Burke concludes his 
address to the electors of Bristol, in defence of his con- 
duct in regard to the American war and the govern- 
ment of Ireland. It just indicates that delicate line 
which separates, in great and generous natures, the 



116 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



highest love of country from the still higher love of 
mankind. "The charges against me," he says, "are 
all of one kind, — that I have carried the principles 
of general justice and benevolence too far, — further 
than a cautious policy would warrant, — further than 
the opinions of many could go along with me. In 
every accident which may happen to me through life, 
in pain, in sorrow, in depression, in distress, — I will 
call to mind this accusation, and be comforted." 

It is a great advance, morally and mentally, when 
a man's heart and brain reach out beyond the sphere 
of his personal interests to comprehend the nation to 
which he belongs ; but there are men whose ascending 
and widening natures refuse to be limited even by the 
sentiment and idea of country, whose raised conceptions 
grasp the beauty of beneficence, the grandeur of truth, 
the majesty of right, and who, in the service of these 
commanding ideas, are ready to suffer all, in the 
spirit of that patience which St. Pierre finely calls 
the " courage of virtue," and to dare all, in the spirit 
of that self-devotion which is certainly the virtue of 
courage. This class includes all reformers in society, 
in government, in philosophy, in religion, whose po- 
sition calls for heroic acts, resolutions, sacrifices, — 
for manhood as well as for mental power. Thus 
Milton, whose whole nature was cast in an heroic 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



117 



mould, who felt himself not merely the countryman 
of Shakespeare and Cromwell, but of Homer and 
Sophocles, of Dante and Tasso, of Luther and Me- 
lancthon, — of all men who acknowledge the sway of 
the beautiful, the noble, and the right, — could not, 
of course, write anything which was not dictated by 
an heroic spirit ; all his sentences, therefore, have the 
animating and penetrating, as well as illuminating 
power of heroic acts, and always imply a character 
strong enough to make good his words. Still, in 
some respects, we may doubt whether the mere 
writing his " Defence of the People of England," rises 
to the dignity of heroism ; but, when his physician 
told him that if he did write it he would lose his 
eyesight, his calm persistence in his work was sub- 
limely heroic. Freedom demanded of the student his 
most precious sense, and he resolutely plucked out 
his eyes, and laid them on her altar, content to abide 
in outward night, provided with the inner eye of the 
soul he could see the stern countenance of inexora- 
ble Duty melt into that approving smile which re- 
wards self-sacrifice with a bliss deeper than all joys 
of sense or raptures of imagination. 

There are occasions, also, where mere intellectual 
hardihood may be in the highest degree heroic. That 
peculiar mo r al fear which is involved in intellectual 



118 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



timidity is often harder to overcome than the physi- 
cal fear of the stake and the rack. There are men 
who will dare death for glory or for country, who 
could not dare scorn or .contumely for the truth ; and 
people generally would rather die than think. Noth- 
ing but that enrapturing sentiment and vivid vision 
implied in the love of truth, nothing but that trans- 
porting thrill which imparadises the soul in the per- 
ception of a new thought, can lift a wise and good 
man above the wholesome prejudices of prudence, 
custom, country, and common belief, and make him 
let loose the immortal idea his mind imprisons, and 
send it forth to war against false systems and te- 
nacious errors, with the firm faith that it will result 
in eventual good, though at first it seems to trail 
along with it the pernicious consequences of a lie. 
Such a man feels the awful responsibility laid upon 
that soul into whose consciousness descends one of 
those revolutionizing truths, 

11 Hard to shape in act : 
For all the past of time reveals 
A bridal dawn of thunder-peals, 
Wherever thought has wedded fact." 

Thus heroic resolution, as well as wide-reaching 
thought, is often indispensable to the philosophic 
thinker ; but when to the deep love of truth is added 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



119 



the deeper love of right, and the thinker stands 
boldly forth as a practical reformer, the obstacles, 
internal and external, to brave and determined effort 
are multiplied both to his conscience and his will. 
A prophet of the future, with his eager eyes fixed 
on hope, — 

" The burning eagle, 
Above the unrisen morrow," — 

he has to labor in the present on men whose inspi- 
ration is memory. The creative and beneficent char- 
acter of his aggressive thought is at first concealed 
by its destructive aspect. His light seems lightning, 
which irradiates not to bless, but to smite. As regards 
his own life and comfort, he may be ready, in every 
exigency, to say, with the hero of Italy, " I had 
rather take one step forward and die, than one step 
backward and live " ; but he often has also to resist 
the tormenting thought that he is sacrificing himself 
only to injure others, and is preparing to go triumph- 
antly through the earthly hell of the martyr's stake, 
only to pass into that hotter hell which is paved with 
good intentions. A universal yell denounces him as 
the apostle of anarchy, falsehood, and irreligion ; and 
nothing but the faith which discerns and takes hold 
of the immortal substance of truth can enable him, 
not only to withstand this shock of adverse opinion, 



120 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



but to deal his prodigious blows with the condensed 
energy of unhesitating, unweakened will. This is true 
strength and fortitude of soul, reposing grandly on 
unseen realities above it, and obstinately resisting the 
evidence of the shifting facts which appear to cast 
doubt on the permanent law. It is probable that 
WicklifFe, Huss, Luther, all heroic men who have 
brought down fire from heaven, the light and the 
heat of truth, had, in moments of despondency, a sly 
and sneering devil at their elbow, mocking them with 
the taunt by which the scoffing messenger of Jove 
adds keener agony to the sufferings of the chained 
Prometheus : — 

c< Those who do endure 
Deep wrongs for man, and scorn, and chains, but heap 
Thousand-fold torment on themselves and him." 

In these remarks, so far, we have laid stress on 
the principle that the inspiration of the hero is the 
positive quality of love, not the negative quality of 
hatred. For example, Carlyle, always writing of 
heroism, is rarely heroic, because he hates falsehood 
rather than loves truth, and is a disorganizer of 
wrong rather than an organizer of right. His writ- 
ings tend to split the mind into a kind of splendid 
disorder, and we purchase some shining fragments of 
ihought at the expense of weakened will. Being 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 121 

negative, he cannot communicate life and inspiration 
to others ; for negation ends in despair, and love alone 
can communicate the life of hope. His negative 
thought, therefore, can never become a positive thing ; 
it can pout, sneer, gibe, growl, hate, declaim, destroy ; 
but it cannot cheer, it cannot create. Now men may 
be soldiers, patriots, and reformers, from the inspira- 
tion of hatred ; but they cannot be heroic. It is love, 
and love alone, whose sweet might liberates men 
from the thraldom of personal considerations, and 
lifts them into the exhilarating region of unselfish 
activity. It is not the fear of shame, but love of 
glory, which makes the purely heroic soldier. It is 
not hatred of other nations, but love of his own, 
which makes the heroic patriot. It is not hatred of 
falsehood and w T rong, but love of truth and right, 
which makes the heroic thinker and reformer. And 
it is not the fear of hell and hatred of the Devil, but 
the love of heaven, which makes the heroic saint. 
All the hatred, all the fear, are incidental and acci- 
dental, not central and positive. We should hardly 
style old King Clovis a saint on the strength of the 
passion he flew into when the account of the Crucifix- 
ion was read to him, and of his fierce exclamation, 
" I would I had been there with my valiant Franks ! 
I would have redressed his wrongs I" 



122 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



The heroism of the saint, the last to be considered 
here, exceeds all other heroism in depth, intensity, 
comprehensiveness, elevation, and wisdom. The hero 
soldier, the hero patriot, the hero reformer, each is 
great by detaching one idea from the sum of things, 
and throwing his whole energies into its realization ; 
but the hero saint views all things in relation to 
their centre and source. He brings in the idea of 
God, and at once the highest earthly objects swiftly 
recede to their proper distance, and dwindle to their 
real dimensions. But this heroism, though it exhibits 
human nature reposing on an all-inclusive idea, the 
mightiest that the heart can conceive or the mind 
dimly grope for on the vanishing edges of intelligence, 
is still not a heroism eagerly coveted or warmly ap 
proved. It is recorded of Saint Theresa, that, after 
she had become old and poor in the service of the 
Lord, and had only two sous left of all her posses- 
sions, she sat down to meditate. u Theresa and two 
sous," she said, " are nothing ; but Theresa, two sous, 
and God, are all things " ; on which Pierre Leroux 
makes the bitter comment: "To the young bucks of 
Paris, Theresa, young and handsome, and worth but 
two sous, would be little ; and Theresa, two sous, and 
God, would be still less!" 

The mental phenomena implied in the acts, or re- 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 123 

corded in the writings, of the heroes of religion are 
of so grand and transcendent a character that one 
can hardly have patience with Mr. Worldly Wise-' 
man, — the worthy gentleman who writes history and 
explains the problems of metaphysics, — when, with 
his knowing look, he disposes of the whole matter by 
some trash about fanaticism and disordered imagina- 
tion. Now glory, country, humanity, are realities 
only to those who love them; and the all-compre- 
hending Reality the saint seeks and adores, is but a 
faint star, 

" Pinnacled dim in the intense mane,'* 
to the wisest of the worldlings. By what right does 
he sit in critical judgment on the saints and martyrs, 
when his point of view is earth, and their point of 
view is heaven ? Religious heroism, indeed, in its 
gradual growth from religious sentiment, is a feeling 
before it is an idea ; but what the heart wishes the 
mind soon discerns ; and the marvellous experiences 
which visit the consciousness of the saint are logical 
results of the gravitation of his nature to its source, 
and are as valid as other facts of immediate per- 
ception. Once roused, this divinizing sentiment kin- 
dles the whole solid mass of his being with its 
penetrating and purifying fire; carries his thoughts, 
affections, passions, to higher levels of character; 



124 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



converts faith into sight, so that at last the n?ys- 
teries of the supernatural world are partially unrolled 
to his eager gaze ; he catches glimpses of glories 
almost too bright for the aching sense to bear ; dis- 
cerns right, truth, beneficence, justice, as radiations 
from one awful loveliness ; and sees 

" Around His throne tlie~ sanctities of heaven 
Stand thick as stars ; and from His sight receive 
Beatitude past utterance." 

Filled and stirred with these wondrous visions, 

" Which o'erinform his tenement of clay," 

he becomes a soldier of the chivalry of spirit, a pa- 
triot of the heavenly kingdom, — the true "pilgrim 
of eternity," burdened beneath the weight of his 
rapture until it finds expression in those electric 
deeds whose shock is felt all over the earth, amazing 
Time itself with a thrill from Eternity. The still, 
deep ecstasy which imparadises his spirit can but 
imperfectly ally itself with human language, though 
it occasionally escapes along his written page in fit- 
ful gleams of celestial lightning, touching such words 
as "joy," and "sweetness," and "rest," with an un- 
earthly significance, a preternatural intensity of mean- 
ing; but the full power of this awful beauty of 
holiness is only seen and felt in the virtues it creates ; 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



125 



in the felicity with which it transmutes calamities 
into occasions for the exercise of new graces of char- 
acter; in the sureness of its glance into the occult se- 
crets of life ; in the solid patience which exhausts all 
the ingenuity of persecution ; in the intrepid meekness 
which is victorious over the despotic might of unhal- 
lowed force ; in the serene audacity which dares all 
the principalities of earth, and defies all the powers 
of hell ; in the triumphant Faith which hears the 
choral chant amidst the torments of the rack, and 
sees the cherubic faces through the glare of the fires 
of martyrdom ! 

But perhaps there is nothing more exquisitely 
simple and touching in the experience of the hero 
of religion, nothing which more startles us by its 
confident faith, than the feeling which animates his 
colloquies and meditations when the spiritual home- 
sickness, the pang of what Coleridge calls the senti- 
ment of " other worldliness," presses on his soul, and 
he confesses to the weakness of desiring to depart. 
Thus figure to yourselves Luther, as he is revealed 
to us in his old age, sitting by the rude table in his 
humble house, and, with a few dear veterans of the 
Reformation, gossiping over the rtfugs of ale on the 
affairs of the celestial kingdom, while the thunders 
of papal and imperial wrath are heard muttering 



126 



HEROIC CHARACTER 



ominously in the distance. Luther tells them that 
he begins to feel the longing to leave their camp on 
earth, and to go home. He is not without hope 
that the Lord, in view of his protracted struggles 
and declining energies, will soon recall him. He is 
resigned, not to die, but to live, if such be the order 
from head-quarters ; but if it be not presumptuous in 
him to proffer a petition, he could wish it to be 
considered that he had sojourned here long enough, 
and should have permission to depart, it mattering 
little to him whether the medium of transfer from 
one world to another be the bed of sickness or the 
martyr's stake. At any rate, however, age is doing 
its sure work even on his stalwart frame ; and he 
closes with the consoling sentiment so finely embod- 
ied by the Christian poet : 

"Within this body pent, 

Absent from Thee I roam : 
But nightly pitch my moving tent 
A day's march nearer home." 

We have thus attempted to picture, with a few 
rude scrawls of the pencil, the heroic spirit, as its 
creative glow successively animates the soldier, the 
patriot, the reformer, and the saint, painfully con- 
scious all the while that w r e have not sounded its 
depth of sentiment, nor measured its height of char- 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



127 



acter, nor told its fulness of joy. We have seen that 
this spirit is a spirit of cheer, and love, and beauty, 
and power, giving the human soul its finest and 
amplest expression ; and that, while its glorious in- 
spiration illuminates history with the splendors of 
romance, it is the prolific source, in humble life, of 
heroic deeds which no history records, no poetry cel- 
ebrates, and of which renown is mute. This spirit is 
everywhere, and it is needed everywhere. It is 
needed to resist low views of business, low views of 
politics, low views of patriotism, low views of life. 
It is needed in every situation where passion tempts, 
sloth enfeebles, fear degrades, power threatens, and 
interest deludes. And it is not without its band of 
witnesses to sound their everlasting protest against 
meanness, cowardice, baseness, and fraud, and tc 
shield in their sustaining arms, and invigorate by 
their immortal presence, the sorely-tempted novices 
of heroic honor and virtue. They rise before the 
soul's eye, a glorious company of immortals, from the 
battle-fields of unselfish fame ; they come from the 
halls w T here patriotism thundered its ardent resolves, 
and from the scaffolds which its self-devotion trans- 
figured into sacrificial altars; they issue from the 
hissing crowd of scorners and bigots through which 
the lone Reformer urged his victorious way ; and they 



128 



HEROIC CHARACTER. 



come from that promised heaven on earth, beaming 
from the halo which encircles the head and beatifies 
the countenance of the saint, smiling celestial disdain 
of torture and death. From all these they come, — 
they press upon the consciousness, — not as dead 
memories of the past, but as living forces of the 
present, to stream into our spirits the resistless en- 
ergies which gladden theirs : — 

" Filling the soul with sentiments august ; 
The beautiful, the brave, the holy, and the just" 



V. 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 

IN studying literature and history, we are at first 
attracted by particular events and individual minds, 
and we rise but gradually to the conception of nations 
and national minds, including, of course, under the 
latter phrase, all the great moving, vital powers ex- 
pressed in the phenomena of a nation's life. The 
external history, the political institutions, the litera- 
ture, laws, and manners of a people, are but its 
thoughts in visible or audible expression, and ever 
carry us back to the Mind whence they proceeded, 
and from which they received their peculiar national 
character. We cannot form just notions even of in- 
dividuals without viewing them as related to their 
age and country, as expressions, more or less emphatic, 
of the National Mind, in whose depths their personal 
being had its birth, and from whose vitality they 
drew the pith and nerve of character. Thus Pericles, 
Scipio, and Chatham lose much of their raciness and 
genuineness if not considered as related in this way 
6* i 



130 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



to Greece, Rome, and England, who bore them, nur- 
tured them, colored and directed their thoughts and 
passions, clothed them with power as with a garment ; 
so that Greece saw in Pericles the mirror of her own 
supple strength and plastic intellect ; and Rome be- 
held in Scipio the image of her own fixed will and 
large reason ; and England recognized in Chatham's 
swift Norman energy and solid Saxon sense the child 
who had drained honesty, intelligence, and imperious 
pride from her own arrogant breast. It thus requires 
a great people to bear a brood of great men ; for 
great men require strong incitements; a field for ac- 
tion ; courage, power, glory, and virtue around as 
well as within them; and if powerful natures do not 
start naturally up, to meet any terrible emergency of 
a nation's life, we may be sure that the National 
Mind has become weak and corrupt, has "lost the 
breed of noble bloods," and that external enemies, 
like empirics dealing with consumptive patients, only 
accelerate a death already doomed by interior de- 
cay. 

Thus, when we would comprehend in one inclusive 
term the intellect and individuality of Greece, or 
Rome, or England, we speak of the Greek, or Ro- 
man, or English mind. A national mind implies a 
nation, not a mere aggregation of individuals or 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



131 



states ; and we propose now to consider the question, 
Whether or not there is such a thing as an Amer- 
ican Mind ; and if so, what are its characteristics 
and tendencies; what is the inspiration, and what 
the direction it gives to the individual man in 
America ? 

In treating this subject, it is important that we 
avoid all that blatant and bragging tone in which 
American conceit thinly veils its self-distrust ; that 
a deaf ear be presented to the exulting dissonance 
of the American chanticleer ; that the Pilgrim Fathers 
be disturbed as little as possible in their well-earned 
graves ; and that the different parts of the discourse 
be not found, like the compositions of certain em- 
inent musicians, to be but symphonious variations 
on the one tune of "Yankee Doodle, ,, . or "Hail 
Columbia. " 

And, first, in view of the varieties of races and in- 
terests included under our government, can we assert 
the existence of an American Mind? We certainly 
cannot do this in the sense in which we say there 
was a Greek mind, whose birth, growth, maturity, and 
decay we can take in at one grasp of generalization ; 
or in the sense in which we say there is an English 
mind, full-grown and thoroughly organized in man- 
ners, institutions, and literature. All that we can as* 



132 



THE AMEBICAN MIND. 



sert is, that the thoughts, acts, and characteis of 
Plymouth Puritan and Virginia Cavalier, through 
two centuries of active existence, have been fused 
into a mass of national thought, character, and life ; 
and that this national life has sufficient energy and 
pliancy to assimilate the foreign natures incessantly 
pouring into it, and to grow, through this process of 
assimilation, into a comprehensive national mind. At 
present we can discern little more than tendencies, 
and the clash and conflict of the various elements; 
but the strongest force — the force to which the oth- 
er elements gravitate, and by which they will all 
eventually be absorbed — is the Saxon-English ele- 
ment in its modified American form. The Celt, the 
German, the Englishman, the Dane, can exist here 
only by parting with his national individuality; for 
he is placed in a current of influences which inevi- 
tably melts him down into the mass of American life. 
But, while this absorption changes his character, it 
modifies also the character of the absorbing force ; 
for the American Mind, with every infusion of for- 
eign mind, adds to its being an element which does 
not lie as a mere novelty on its surface, but pene- 
trates into its flexible and fluid substance, mixes with 
its vital blood, and enriches or impoverishes, elevates 
or depraves, its inmost nature ; and so organic in its 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



133 



character is this seeming abstraction of a nation, that, 
for every such infusion of a foreign element, each 
citizen is either injured or benefited, and finds that 
he acts and thinks the better or the worse for it. 
The balm or the poison steals mysteriously into him 
from all surrounding circumstances : from the press, 
from politics, from trade, from social communion, from 
the very air he breathes, come the currents of a new 
life to warm or to chill, to invigorate or deaden, his 
individual heart and brain. This fact goes under the 
name of a change in public sentiment ; and have we 
not often witnessed its miracles of apostasy or con- 
version wrought on men whose characters we fondly 
thought fixed as fate ? 

The American Mind thus promises to be a com- 
posite mind, — composite in the sense of assimilation, 
not of mere aggregation. Its two original elements 
were the Englishman who came here to found, repair, 
or increase his estate, and the Englishman who was 
driven here by political and ecclesiastical oppression. 
Of these, the stronger of the two is undoubtedly 
the latter; and the last probe of historical and criti- 
cal analysis touches him at the nation's centre and 
heart. This Puritan Englishman was all character : 
strong in the energy, courage, practical skill and 
hard persistency of character: with a characteristic 



134 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



religion, morality, and temper of mind ; at once the 
most forcible and the most exclusive man that the 
seventeenth century produced. Yet from this bigoted, 
austere, iron- willed, resisting, and persisting Saxon 
religionist — intolerant of other natures, from the very 
solidity and lowering might of his own — has sprung 
the flexible, assimilative, compromising, all-accom 
plished Yankee, who is neither Puritan nor Cavalier, 
Englishman, Irishman, Frenchman, nor German, but 
seems to have a touch of them all, and is ready to 
receive and absorb them all. A Protean personage, 
he can accommodate himself to any circumstances, to 
all forms of society, government, and religion. He 
is the staid, sensible farmer, merchant, or mechanic 
of New England, w r ith his restlessness subdued into 
inveterate industry and power of rigid application ; 
but he is also Sam Slick in the Provinces, and Nim- 
rod Wildfire in Kentucky, and Jefferson Brick on 
the frontier. Through all disguises, and in every 
clime visited by sin and trade, peep the shrewd 
twinkle of his knowing eyes and the multiform move- 
ments of his cunning fingers ! Let him drop down 
in Siberia or Japan, in England or Italy, in a South- 
ern plantation or Western settlement, and he seems 
to say, " Gentlemen, behold the smartest man in all 
creation! one who will put your brain into his head, 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



135 



get at your secret, and beat you in the art of being 
yourselves ; so please fall into rank, deliver up your 
purses, acknowledge your born lord and king!" 

We have not time to discuss here the question, 
how a national mind, which is distinguished above 
all others for mental hospitality and general availa- 
bleness, had its root in a Puritanism as unaccommo- 
dating as it was powerful. It is, perhaps, sufficient 
to say, in explanation, that the Puritan, narrow and 
isolated as he seems, had one side of his nature wide 
open to liberal influences. His religious creed, it 
is true, was authoritative ; he submitted to it him- 
self, he enforced it upon others; but in political 
speculation he was audaciously independent. In the 
art and science of government he had no European 
equal either among statesmen or philosophers, and his 
politics, constantly connected as they were with his 
industrial enterprise, eventually undermined his des- 
potic theology. But our business here is with the 
American Mind as it now is, and as it promises to 
be hereafter. This mind we must consider as having 
its expression in the nation's life ; and certainly the 
first survey of it reveals a confusion of qualities 
which apparently elude analysis and defy generaliz- 
ation. This confusion results, as in the individual 
mind, from the variety of unassimilated elements in 



136 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



contact or collision with the national personality ; and 
accordingly its harmony is disturbed by a mob of 
noisy opinions, which never have, and some of which, 
we trust, never will, become living ideas and active 
forces. The consequence of this juxtaposition of 
mental organization with mental anarchy, in a na 
tional mind hospitable to everything, and now onlj 
visible to us in its fierce, swift, devouring growth, if* . 
a lack of solidity, depth, and tenacity in comparison 
with its nimbleness, and a disposition to combine o 
superficial enthusiasm for theories with a shrewd hold 
upon things throughout the broad field of its restless, 
curious, inventive, appropriative, scheming, plausible, 
glorious, and vainglorious activity. But the two 
grand leading characteristics of its essential nature 
are energy and impressibility, — an impressibility all 
alive to the most various objects, and receptive of 
elements conflicting with each other, and a primitive, 
inherent energy, too quick, fiery, and buoyant to be 
submerged by the wealth of life which its impressi- 
bility pours into it ; an energy which whelms in its 
stream all slower and feebler natures with which it 
comes in contact, and rushes onward with the force 
of fate and the intelligence of direction. 

In estimating the quantity and quality of this men- 
tal energy, we must ascertain the different channels 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



137 



of work and production into which it is poured. 
Work of some kind is the measure of its power and 
the test of its quality ; but we must avoid the fallacy 
of supposing that art and literature are the only ex- 
pressions of a nation's intellect. It would, indeed, be 
a grotesque libel on some ten millions of educated 
people to declare that American literature represented 
more than a fraction of American intelligence. That 
intelligence has received a practical direction, and is 
expressed, not in Iliads and JEneids, not in Principias 
and Cartoons, but in commerce, in manufactures, in the 
liberal professions, in the mechanic arts, in the arts of 
government and legislation, in all those fields of labor 
where man grapples directly with nature, or with so- 
cial problems which perplex his practical activity. 
To describe the miracles which American energy has 
wrought in these departments would be to invade a 
domain sacred to caucus speeches and all kinds of 
starred-and-striped bravado, and perhaps they speak 
for themselves with far more emphasis than orators 
can speak for them, having hieroglyphed, as Carlyle 
would say, "America, her mark," over a whole con- 
tinent ; but it is not generally admitted that mind 

— analytical, assimilative, constructive, creative mind 

— is as much implied in these practical directions of 
intelligence as in abstract science and the fine arts 



138 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



so that, if. a sudden upward ideal turn were given to 
the national sentiment, the intellectual energy which 
would leave contriving railroads, calculating markets, 
and creating capital, and rush into epics, lyrics, and 
pastorals, would make Wall Street stare and totter, 
and our present generation of poets strangle them- 
selves with their own lines. Indeed, observation, 
reason, and imagination are powers which do not lose 
their nature in their application to widely different 
objects. Thus Sir William Hamilton, the acutest 
analyst of Aristotle's mental processes, declares that 
abstruse and seemingly juiceless metaphysician to 
have had as great an imagination as Homer; and 
though we are prone to associate imagination with 
some elevation of sentiment, Shakespeare has given 
more of it to Iago, and Goethe has given more of it 
to Mephistopheles, than Nature gave to Bishop Heber, 
the purest of England's minor poets. Applying this 
principle to business, we shall find much to disturb 
the self-content of second-rate litterateurs and savans, 
who are accustomed to congratulate themselves that, 
if others have the money, they at least have the brains, 
if we should sharply scrutinize the mental processes 
of a first-rate merchant. Is it observation you de- 
mand? Behold with what keen accuracy he perceives 
and discriminates facts. Is it understanding ? Look 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



139 



at the long trains of reasoning, — the conclusion of 
each argument forming the premise of the next,— 
by which he moves, step by step, to an induction on 
whose soundness he risks character and fortune. Is 
it will ? Mark him when a financial hurricane sweeps 
over the money-market, and observe how firm is his 
grasp of principles, and how intelligently his cold eye 
surveys the future, while croakers all around him are 
selling and sacrificing their property in paroxysms of 
imbecile apprehension. Is it imagination? See how 
to him, in his dingy counting-house, the past becomes 
present, and the distant, near ; his mind speeding from 
St. Petersburg to London, from Smyrna to Calcutta, 
on wings which mock the swiftness of steamers and 
telegraphs ; or, bridging over the spaces which divide 
sensible realities from ideal possibilities, see how he 
blends in one consistent idea and purpose stray 
thoughts and separate facts, whose hidden analogies 
the eye alone of imagination could divine. Is it, in 
short, general force and refinement of mind ? Behold 
how comprehensive and how cautious is his glance over 
that sensitive, quivering, ever-shifting sea of commer- 
cial phenomena, — so wide as to belt the globe, and 
so intimately connected that a jar in any part sends 
a thrill through the whole, — and note with what 
subtle certainty of insight he penetrates beneath the 



140 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



seeming anarchy, and clutches the slippery and elu- 
sive but unvarying laws. There is, indeed, a com- 
mercial genius, as well as a poetical and metaphysi- 
cal genius, — the faculties the same, the sentiments 
and the direction different. Wealth may be, if you 
please, often insolent and unfeeling ; may scorn, as 
visionary, things more important than wealth ; but still 
it is less frequently blundered into than artists and 
philosophers are inclined to believe. 

But though we can thus trace the same radical 
mental energy in industrial as in artistical labors, 
the force and durability of a nation's mind still de- 
mand not only diversity in its industrial occupations, 
but a diversity in the direction of the mind itself, 
w T hich shall answer to the various sentiments and ca- 
pacities of the soul. It is in this comprehensive- 
ness that most nations fail, their activity being nar- 
rowed by the dominion of one impulse and tendency, 
which leads them to the summit of some special 
excellence, and then surely precipitates them into 
decay and ruin. Such narrowness is the death of 
mind, and national exclusiveness is national suicide. 
Thus the genius and capital of Italy were dispropor- 
tionately directed to the fine arts ; its wealth is now, 
accordingly, too much in palaces and cathedrals, in 
pictures and statues ; and its worship of beauty, and 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



141 



disdain of the practical, have resulted in an idle and 
impoverished people, deficient in persistency, in en- 
ergy, even in artistical creativeness, and the easy 
prey of insolent French and Austrian arras and 
diplomacy. Such a country cannot be made free by 
introducing acres of rant on the rights of man, but 
by establishing commerce, manufactures, and a living 
industry. Again, the higher philosophy of Germany 
has been directed too exclusively to abstract specu- 
lation, altogether removed from actual life ; and the 
reason is not to be sought in the assertion that the 
German mind lacks solidity, but in the fact that an 
arbitrary government has heretofore refused all free- 
dom to German thought, unless it were exercised in 
a region above the earth and beyond politics, and 
there it may be the chartered libertine of chaos or 
atheism. By thus denying citizenship to the thinker, 
the state has made him licentious in speculation. 
He may theorize matter out of existence, Christ out 
of the Scriptures, and God out of the universe, 
and the government nods in the very sleepiness of 
toleration ; but the moment he doubts the wisdom 01 
some brazen and nonsensical lie embodied in a law, 
or whispers aught against the meanest official under- 
ling, he does it with the dungeon or the scaffold star- 
ing him in the face ; and the grim headsman perhaps 



142 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



reminds him that he lives under a paternal govern- 
ment, where he is free to blaspheme God, but not to 
insult the House of Hapsburg. Now, as the German's 
metaphysics have been vitiated by his lack of politi- 
cal rights, and as the Italian's exclusive devotion to 
art has extinguished even the energy by which art 
is produced, so there is danger that our extreme 
practical and political turn will vulgarize and debase 
our national mind to that low point where the ener- 
gy and the motive to industrial production are lost. 
There can be no reasonable fear that the beautiful 
in art or the transcendental in thought will over- 
whelm our faculty of making bargains; but there is 
danger that the nation's worship of labors whose 
worth is measured by money will give a sordid char- 
acter to its mightiest exertions of power, eliminate 
heroism from its motives, destroy all taste for lofty 
speculation and all love for ideal beauty, and inflame 
individuals with a devouring self-seeking, corrupting 
the very core of the national life. The safety of the 
American from this gulf of selfishness and avarice is 
to be looked for, partly in the prodigious moral, 
mental, and benevolent agencies he has established 
all around him, and partly in that not unamiable 
vanity by which he is impelled, not only to make 
money, but to do something great or " smart " in his 
way of making it. 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



143 



This living and restless mass of being which forms 
the organic body of American life, — decent, orderly, 
respectable, intelligent, and productive, — with Eco- 
nomics as the watchword of its onward movement, has, 
from the intensity of its practical direction, roused 
the diseased opposition of two classes on the vanish- 
ing extremes of its solid substance ; namely, a class 
of violent reformers who scorn economics on the 
ground of morality, and a. class of violent radicals 
who scorn economics on the ground of glory ; and 
these are in irreconcilable enmity with each other, as 
well as in distempered antagonism to the nation. 
The first class, commonly passing under the name of 
" Come-outers," have almost carried the principle of 
free-will and personal responsibility to the extent of 
converting themselves from individuals into individu- 
alisms, and they brand every man who consents to 
stay in a wicked community like ours as a partici- 
pant in the guilt and profits of its sins. The Come- 
outer, when he thoroughly comes out, protests against 
the whole life of society, condemning, from certain 
abstract propositions, all its concrete laws, customs, 
morality, and religion, and strives to separate himself 
from the national mind, and live morally and men- 
tally apart from it. But this last is a hopeless effort. 
To the community he is vitally bound, and he can 



144 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



no more escape from it than he can escape from the 
grasp of the earth's attraction should he leap into the 
air for the purpose of establishing himself away off 
in space. The earth would say to him, as she 
hauled him back, " If you dislike my forests, fell them ; 
if my mountains trouble you, blast through them ; plant 
in me what you will, and, climate permitting, it shall 
grow ; but as for your leaving me, and speeding off 
into infinite space on a vagabond excursion round the 
sun on your own account, that you shall not do, so 
help me — gravitation ! * 

It is needless to say that the Come-outer, in his 
zeal for abstract morality, glories in a heroic indif- 
ference to consequences, and a conscientious blindness 
to the mutual relations of rights and duties. In- 
trenched in some passionate proposition, he exhibits 
a perfect mastery of that logic of anarchy by which 
single virtues, detached from their relations, are 
pushed into fanaticism and almost take the form of 
vices. Virtue consists in the harmony of virtues ; 
but, divorcing moral insight from moral sentiment, 
he ignores the complexity of the world's practical 
affairs, and would go, in the spirit of Schiller's zealot, 

" Right onward like the lightning and 
The cannon-ball, opening with murderous crash 
His way to blast and ruin." 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



145 



Indeed, he sometimes brings to mind the story of 
that wise man who, when he desired to make a cup 
of tea, could hit upon no happier contrivance for 
boiling the kettle than by placing it in the kitchen 
and setting his house on fire. Again, he is some- 
times raised to such a height of feverish indignation 
as to mistake his raptures of moral rage for prophet- 
ic fury, and anticipates the stern, sure, silent march 
of avenging laws with a blast that splits the brazen 
throats of denunciation's hundred trumpets. In view 
of the evils of the world he seems hungry for a fire 
from heaven to smite and consume iniquity. His 
prayer seems continually to be, " O Lord, why so 
slow ? " and, though this discontent may be termed by 
some enthusiasts a divine impatience, it appears to be 
rather an impatience with Divinity. It is the exact 
opposite of that sublime repose in the purposes of 
Providence expressed by the philosophical historian, 
that " God moves through history as the giants of 
Homer through space : he takes a step, — and ages 
have rolled away ! " 

Doubtless, in this class of extreme social Protest- 
ants, — a class whose peculiarities we have almost 
heightened to caricature, in attempting to individu- 
alize its ideal, — there is much talent, much disinter- 
estedness, much unflinching courage; and, if they 
7 J 



146 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



would make a modest contribution of these to the 
nation's moral life, they and society would both be 
gainers ; but they are " self- withdrawn into such a won- 
drous depth " of hostile seclusion, that they are only 
visible in their occasional incursions, or when they 
encamp in the community during Anniversary Week. 
They are not, in fact, more narrow, more ridden by 
their one idea of morals, than many of our practical 
men, who are ridden by their one idea of money; 
but their extravagance of phrase, almost annihilating, 
as it does, the meaning of words considered as signs 
of things, prevents their influencing the people they 
attack ; and, after beginning with a resounding prom- 
ise to reform the world, they too often end in a 
desperate emulation among themselves to bear off the 
palm in vehemence of execration, launched against all 
those organized institutions by which society is pro- 
tected from the worst consequences of its worldliness, 
selfishness, sensuality, and crime. 

As the class of persons to which we have just re- 
ferred push the principle of individualism to the ex- 
tent of forswearing allegiance to the community, so 
there is another class, on the opposite extreme, who 
carry the doctrine of a Providence in human affairs 
to a fatalistic conclusion, which they are pleased to 
call Manifest Destiny ; a doctrine which baptizes rob- 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



147 



bery and murder as providential phenomena, — what 
kind and condescending patrons of Providence these 
blackguards are, to be sure ! — of inherent national 
tendencies ; considers national sins simply as neces- 
sary events in the nation's progress to glory ; and, by 
treating every direction given to the public mind as 
inevitable, is sure to inflame and pamper the worst. 
This dogma — the coinage of rogues, who find it 
very convenient to call man's guilt by the name of 
God's providence — mostly obtains on the southern 
frontier of our country, w T here the settlers, amidst 
their forests and swamps, have a delectable view of 
the land flowing with milk and honey, which destiny 
manifestly intends they shall occupy, on the clearest 
principles of the argumentation of rapine. It must 
be admitted that this class of our fellow-sinners and 
citizens, by holding up endless war and hectic glory 
in the faces of our shrewd and prudent worldlings, 
scare them much more than the hottest and hearti- 
est invectives of the reformers. We bear, it seems., 
with bland composure the charge of being robbers 
and murderers, tyrants and liberticides ; but our blood 
runs cold at the vision of a bomb descending into 
Boston or New York, or the awful calamity in- 
volved in the idea of United States sixes going 
below part 



148 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



Manifest Destiny is, of course, a tempestuously- 
furious patriot, whose speech — ever under a high 
pressure of bombast — is plentifully bedizened with 
metaphors of his country's stars and stripes, and rap- 
turous anticipations of the rascal's " good time com- 
ing." Among other Satanic fallacies he has one, 
conned out of the Devil's prayer-book, called, " Our 
country, right or wrong ! " a stupid fallacy at the best, 
when we consider that the activity of every nation 
is bounded by inexorable moral laws as by walls of 
fire, to pass which is to be withered up and con- 
sumed; but especially fallacious from his lips, when 
we reflect that, practically, he inverts the maxim, 
and really means, " Our country, wrong or right, with 
a decided preference for the former." Spite of all 
professions, we must doubt the fidelity of that sailor 
who, in a hurricane, shows his devotion to his ship 
by assisting her tendency downward ; and, on the same 
principle, we may doubt Mr. Manifest Destiny's all- 
for-glory, nothing-for-money patriotism. 

The fallacy, indeed, of the fatalistic scheme, as 
applied to nations, is the same as when applied to 
individuals ; and its doctrine of inevitable tendencies 
comes from considering mind as a blind force, not as 
an intelligent, responsible, self-directing energy. A 
plastic, fluid, impressible national mind, like the 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



149 



American, receives a new impulse and direction for 
every grand sentiment, every great thought, every 
heroic act, every honest life, contributed to it; and 
that philosophy which screams out to reasonable citi- 
zens, "The tendency of the nation is toward the 
edge of the bottomless pit, therefore, patriotically as- 
sist the movement," is the insane climax of the non 
sequitur in political logic. Why, we can shield our- 
selves from such a conclusion, with no better reason- 
ing than that employed by the grave-digger in Hamlet, 
in discussing the question of suicide : " Here lies the 
water ; here stands the man : if the man go to the 
water and drown himself, it is — will he, nill he — he 
goes ; but if the water come to him, and drown him, 
he drowns not himself: argal, he that is not guilty 
of his own death shortens not his own life." We 
may be sure that no nation, which goes not to the 
fire, will ever have the fire come to it. Heaven is 
liberal of its blessings and benignities, but it prac- 
tises a rigid economy in dispensing its smiting curses, 
and lets loose its reluctant angels of calamity and 
death only as they are drawn down by the impious 
prayers of folly and crime ! 

If the too exclusive direction of the American 
mind to industrial production has not been much 
checked by the two antagonistic extremes of radical- 



150 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



ism its money-oeracy has provoked, and for whose 
excesses it is to a great degree responsible, we must 
look for a healthier opposition to it in the various 
classes of moderate dissentients and reformers, who 
are not so much disgusted with the community as to 
lose all power of influencing it, and who are steadily 
infusing into their own and the national character 
loftier ideas and more liberalizing tastes. Our church- 
es, collegiate institutions, and numerous societies es- 
tablished for moral and benevolent ends, are connected 
with the national mind, and at the same time are 
inspired by influences apart from it ; but . still, we 
must admit that just in proportion as the nation's 
life circulates through them is their tendency to tem- 
porize with Mammon. The Church, for instance, ex- 
ercises a vast and beneficent influence in spreading 
moral and religious ideas ; but do we not often hear 
sermons in which industrial prosperity is uncon- 
sciously baptized with great pomp of sacred rhetoric ? 
and prayers, in which railroads and manufactories 
hold a place among Divine favors altogether different 
from the estimate in which they are held above ? 
Do we, mad as we all are after riches, hear often 
enough from the pulpit the spirit of those words in 
which Dean Swift, in his epitaph on the affluent and 
profligate Colonel Chartres, announces the small es- 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



151 



teem of wealth in the eyes of God, from the fact of 
his thus lavishing it upon the meanest and basest of 
his creatures? 

Our theology is closer to the public mind, both to 
act and to be acted upon, than our literature. In- 
deed, if we take the representative men of those 
classes whose productions, ethical, poetical, and artis- 
tical, we call American literature and art, we shall 
find that the national life is not so much their inspi- 
ration as it is the object they would inspire. Chan- 
ning and Allston, for instance, have a purified deli- 
cacy and refinement of nature, a constant reference 
to the universal in morals and taste, and a want of 
ruddy and robust strength, indicating that they have 
not risen genially out of the national mind, and be- 
traying, in all their words and colors, that surround- 
ing influences were hostile rather than sustaining to 
their genius. Their works, accordingly, have neither 
the exclusiveness nor the raciness and gusto charac- 
teristic of genius which is national. The same prin- 
ciple applies to our poetical literature, which worships 
Beauty, but not beautiful America. If you observe 
the long line of the English poets, Chaucer, Shake- 
speare, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Pope, Byron, with hardly 
the exceptions of Spenser and Milton, you will find 
that, however heaven-high some of them are in ele- 



152 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



vation, they all rest on the solid base of English 
character;- idealize, realize, or satirize English history 
customs, or scenery, English modes of thought and 
forms of society, English manners or want of manners, 
English life and English men, — are full, in short, 
of English blood. But our most eminent poets — 
Dana, Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell — are 
more or less idealists, from the necessity of their 
position. Though they may represent the woods and 
streams of American nature, they commonly avoid 
the passions and thoughts of American human nature. 
The " haunt and main region of their song " is man 
rather than men ; humanity in its simple elements, 
rather than complex combinations ; and their mission 
is to stand somewhat apart from the rushing stream 
of American industrial life, and, assimilating new ele- 
ments from other literatures, or directly from visible 
nature, to pour into that stream, as rills into a river, 
thoughtfulness, and melody, and beauty. Their pro- 
ductions being thus contributions to the national 
mind, rather than offsprings of it, are contempla- 
tive rather than lyrical, didactic rather than dra- 
matic. 

Perhaps the fairest and least flattering expression 
of our whole national life may be found in our poli- 
tics ; for in limited monarchies and in democracies it 



TEE AMERICAN MIND. 



153 



is in politics that all that there is in the public mind 
of servility, stupidity, ferocity, and unreasoning pre- 
judice is sure to come glaringly out ; and certainly 
our politics will compare favorably with those of 
Greece and Rome, of France and England, in re- 
spect either to intelligence or morality. In no coun- 
try is the government more narrowly watched ; in no 
country do large parties, bound together by an inter- 
est, more readily fall apart on a principle ; and when 
we consider that, in practical politics, force and pas- 
sion, not reason and judgment, are predominant, — 
that men vote with a storm of excitement hurrying 
them on, — this fact indicates that the minor morali- 
ties have to a great extent become instincts with the 
people. It would be impossible to give here even a 
scanty view of this political expression of our national 
mind with its sectional contests, its struggles of free- 
dom with slavery, its war of abstract philosophies on 
concrete interests, its impassioned moralities, and no 
less impassioned immoralities ; but perhaps a few 
remarks on three great statesmen, who are marked 
by unmistakable local and national traits, and who 
were genuine products of American life, may not be 
out of place even here. We refer to Webster, Clay, 
and Calhoun. These, though " dead, yet speak " ; 
and we shall allude to them as if they still occupied 
7* 



154 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



bodily that position in our politics which they un- 
questionably occupy mentally. Such men can only die 
with the movements they originated. 

Of these three eminences of our politics, of late 
years, Webster may be called the most comprehen- 
sive statesman, Clay the most accomplished politician, 
and Calhoun the nimblest and most tenacious sec- 
tional par tisan. Webster, on the first view, seems a 
kind of Roman-Englishman, — a sort of cross between 
Cincinnatus and Burke ; but, examined more closely, 
he is found to be a natural elevation in the progress 
of American life, a man such as New Hampshire 
bore him, and such as Winthrop and Standish, 
Washington and Jay, Hamilton and Madison, have 
made him ; a man who drew the nutriment of char- 
acter altogether from American influences ; and, es- 
pecially, a man representing the iron of the national 
character as distinguished from its quicksilver. The 
principal wealth of New Hampshire is great men and 
water-power ; but, instead of keeping them to herself, 
she squanders them on Massachusetts, and Webster 
was one of these free gifts. 

If we compare Webster with Calhoun, we shall find 
in both the same firm mental grasp of principles, the 
same oversight of the means of popularity, and the 
same ungraceful and almost sullen self-assertion, at 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



155 



periods when policy would have dictated a more fa- 
cile accommodativeness. Their intellects, though both 
in some degree entangled by local interests and 
opinions, have inherent differences, visible at a glance. 
Webster's mind has more massiveness than Calhoun's, 
is richer in culture and variety of faculty, and is 
gifted with a wider sweep of argumentation ; but it 
is not so completely compacted with character, and 
has, accordingly, less inflexible and untiring persist- 
ence toward an object. Both are comparatively un- 
impressible, but Webster's understanding recognizes 
and includes facts which his imagination may refuse 
to assimilate ; while Calhoun arrogantly ignores every- 
thing which contradicts his favorite opinions. The 
mind of Webster, weighty, solid, and capacious, looks 
before and after ; by its insight reads principles in 
events, by its foresight reads events in principles 
and, arching gloriously over all the phenomena of a 
widely complex subject of contemplation, views things, 
not singly, but in their multitudinous relations; yet 
the very comprehension of his vision makes him 
somewhat timid, and his moderation, accordingly, lacks 
the crowning grace of moral audacity. Calhoun has 
audacity, but lacks comprehensiveness. 

As Webster's mind, from its enlargement of vie\r, 
has an instinctive intellectual conscientiousness, the 



156 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



processes of his reasoning are principally inductive, 
rising from facts to principles ; while Calhoun's are 
principally deductive, . descending from principles to 
facts. Now deduction is doubtless a sublime exercise 
of logical genius, provided the principle be reached — 
as it is reached by Webster, when he uses the pro- 
cess — by induction; for it gives the mind power to 
divine the future, and converts prophecy into a science. 
Thus, from the deductive law of gravitation we can 
predict the appearance of stellar phenomena thousands 
of years hence. Edmund Burke is the greatest of 
British statesmen, in virtue of his discovery and ap- 
plication of deductive laws applicable to society and 
government. But the mischief of Calhoun's deductive 
method is, that, by nature or position, his understand- 
ing is controlled by his will ; and, consequently, his 
principles are often arbitrarily or capriciously chosen, 
do not rise out of the nature of things, but out of 
the nature of Mr. Calhoun ; and therefore it is fre- 
quently true of him, what Macaulay untruly declares 
of Burke, that " he chooses his position like a fanat- 
ic, and defends it like a philosopher," — as it might 
be said that Clay chooses his like a tactician, and de- 
fends it like a fanatic. 

If we carefully study the speeches of Web-ter and 
Calhoun, in one of those great Congressional battles 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



157 



where they were fairly pitted against each other, we 
shall find that Webster's mind darts beneath the 
smooth and rapid stream of his opponent's deductive 
argument at a certain point, — fastens fatally on some 
phrase, or fact, or admission, in winch the fallacy 
lurks, — and then devotes his reply to a searching 
analysis and logical overthrow of that, without heed- 
ing the rest. Calhoun, of course, has the ready 
rejoinder that the thing demolished is twisted out of 
its relations ; and then, with admirable control of his 
face, proceeds to dip into Webster's inductive argu- 
ment, to extract some fact or principle which is in- 
dissolubly related to what goes before and comes 
after, and thus really misrepresents the reasoning he 
seemingly answers. To overthrow Calhoun you have, 
like Napoleon at Wagram, only to direct a tremen- 
dous blow at the centre ; to overthrow Webster, 
like Napoleon at Borodino, you must rout the whole 
line. 

In the style of the two men we have, perhaps, 
the best expression of their character; for style, it 
has been well said, "is the measure of power, — as 
the waves of the sea answer to the winds that call 
them up." Webster's style varies with the moods 
of his mind, — short, crisp, biting, in sarcasm ; lumi- 
nous and even in statement ; rigid, condensed, massive, 



158 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



in argumentation ; lofty and resounding in feeling ; 
fierce, hot, direct, overwhelming, in passion. Cal- 
houn's has the uniform vigor and clear precision of 
a spoken essay. 

Clay — the love of American economics, as Web- 
ster was the pride — had all those captivating per- 
sonal qualities which attract men's admiration, at the 
same time that they enforce their respect; and was 
especially gifted w 7 ith that flexibility, — that prompt, 
intuitive, heart-winning grace, — which his great con- 
temporaries lacked. The secret of his influence must 
not be sought in his printed speeches. We never go 
to them as we go to Webster's and Calhoun's for 
political philosophy and vehement logic. But if 
Webster as an orator was inductive, and convinced 
the reason, and Calhoun deductive, and dazzled the 
reason, Clay was most assuredly seductive, and car- # 
ried the votes. The nature of Clay, without being 
deficient in force, was plastic and fluid, readily ac- 
commodating itself to the moment's exigency, and 
more solicitous to comprehend all the elements of 
party power than all the elements of political thought. 
His faculties and passions seem all to have united in 
one power of personal impressiveness, and that per- 
sonality once penetrated a whole party, bound togeth- 
er discordant interests and antipathies, made itself 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



159 



felt as inspiration equally in Maine and Louisiana, 
concentrated in itself the enthusiasm of sense for 
principles, and of sensibility for men ; and these, the 
qualities of a powerful political leader, who makes all 
the demagogues work for him, without being himself 
a demagogue, indicated his possession of something, at 
least, of that 

" Mystery of commanding ; 
That birth-hour gift, that art-Napoleon, 
Of winning, fettering, wielding, moulding, banding 
The hearts of millions, till they move as one." 

But the fact that Clay never reached the object 
of his ambition proves that he was not a perfect 
specimen of the kind of character to which he be- 
longed ; and his personality, — swift, fusing, potent as 
it was, — alert, compromising, supple as it was, — 
still was not under thoroughly wise direction ; and a 
sense of honor morbidly quick, and a resentment of 
slight nervously egotistic, sometimes urged our most 
accomplished politician into impolitic acts, which lev- 
elled the labors of years. 

Perhaps the best test even of a man's intellect is 
the way he demeans himself when he is enraged; 
and in this Webster was pre-eminent above all 
American orators, while Calhoun was apt to lose his 
balance, and become petty and passionate, and Clay 



160 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



to exhibit a kind of glorious recklessness. Most of 
the faults of Webster proceeded from his comprehend 
siveness of understanding being often unaccompanied 
by a vigorous impetus from sentiment and feeling ; 
and some of his orations are therefore unimpassioned 
statements and arguments, which, however much they 
may claim our assent as logicians, do not stir, and 
thrill, and move us as men. Coming from but one 
portion of his own nature, they touch only one portion 
of the nature of others, and wield no dominion over 
the will. Such was his celebrated speech on the Slav 
ery question, which so many found difficult to answer 
and impossible to accept. Not so was it when passion 
and sentiment penetrated his understanding; for, in 
"Webster, passion was a fire which fused intellect and 
character into one tremendous personal force, and 
then burst out that resistless eloquence in which words 
have the might and meaning of things, — that true 
mental electricity, not seen in dazzling, zigzag flashes, 
— not heard in a grand, reverberating peal over the 
head, — but in which, mingling the qualities of light 
and sound, the blue 'bright flame startles and stings the 
eye at the very moment the sharp crash pierces and 
stuns the ear. No brow smitten by that bolt, though the 
brow of a Titan, could ever afterward lift itself above 
the crowd without being marked by its enduring scar; 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



161 



and it was well that a great, and not easily moved, 
nature, abundantly tried by all that frets and teases 
the temper, should thus have borne within himself 
such a terrible instrument of avenging justice, when 
meanness presumed too far on the moderation of that 
large intellect, when insolence goaded too sharply that 
sullen fortitude ! 

The three great statesmen to whom we have re- 
ferred, taken together, cover three all-important ele- 
ments in every powerful national mind, — re^stance, 
persistence, and impressibility ; and each, by repre- 
senting at the same time some engrossing industrial 
interest, indicates that practical direction of the na- 
tional energies to which we have all along referred. 
In this region of industry the nation has been grand- 
ly creative ; and, by establishing the maxim that the 
production of wealth is a matter secondary to its 
distribution, it promises to be as grandly beneficent. 
But, perhaps, in the art and science of government it 
has been more creative and more beneficent than in the 
province of industry. The elements of order and radi- 
calism it embosoms are in a healthy rather than de- 
structive conflict, so that we may hope that even the 
problem of slavery will be settled without any wide- 
spread ruin and devastation. The mischief of radi- 
calism in other countries is, that it commences ref- 

K 



162 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



ormation by abjuring law; accordingly, it opposes 
political power on the principles of anarchy, and 
wields it on the principles of despotism. Here the 
toughest problem in the science of government has 
been practically solved, by the expedient of legaliz- 
ing resistance ; and thus, by providing legal inlets 
and outlets for insurrection and revolution, we reap 
the benefits of rebellion, and avoid its appalling evils.* 
A nation which has done this can afford to bear 
some taunts on its vices and defect-, especially as 
its sensitive vanity impels it to appropriate the truth 
contained in every sarcasm under which it winces. 

It now remains to ask how a national mind like 
the American, with its powers generally directed by 
its sentiments to commerce, industrial production, law, 
and politics, — which are the most lucrative occupa- 
tions, — and but relatively directed to reforms, — 
which are the most unprofitable, — how it appears 
when tested by those virtues which are the conditions 
of a nation's durable strength? The question is not 
one of particulars, because, in every social system, no 
matter how far advanced in humane culture, there 
will always be individuals and small classes repre- 
senting the vices of every grade of civilization which 

* The crime of the Southern Rebellion specially consisted in 
violating this fundamental principle of American politics. 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



163 



history or tradition has recorded, from cannilals all 
the way down to dandies. We have our share of 
New Zealand and our share of Almacks ; but in 
viewing a national mind we must fasten on the 
strongest elements and the average humanity. Looked 
at from this liberal point, American life would bear 
comparatively well the tests of prudence, moderation, 
and benevolence ; a little less confidently, those of 
veracity, steadfastness, and justice ; and considerably 
less those of beauty, heroism, and self-devotion. 

But it is not so much in the present as in the fu- 
ture that we have the grandest vision of the Amer- 
ican mind. We have seen that its organic substance, 
as distinguished from the unas.-imilated elements in 
contact or conflict with it, is solidly and productively 
practical ; and as it is a sleepless energy, resisting, 
persisting, and impressible, we may hope that it will 
transmute into itself the best life of other national 
minds, without having its individuality overwhelmed ; 
that it will be strong and beautiful with their virtues 
and accomplishments, without being weak with their 
vices and limitations ; and that, continually enriched 
by new and various mental life, it will result in being 
% comprehensive national mind, harmoniously com- 
bining characteristics caught from all nations, — so 
that Greece might in it recognize beauty, and Rome 



164 



THE AMERICAN MIND. 



will, and Germany earnestness, and Italy art, anc? 
France vivacity, and Ireland impulse, and England 
tenacity. It is in this contemplation of America as 
a conquering Mind that we should most delight, — a 
mind worthy of the broad continent it is to overarch, 
— a mind too sound at the core for ignorance to stu- 
pefy, or avarice to harden, or lust of power to con- 
sume, — a mind full in the line of the historical 
progress of the race, holding wide relations with all 
communities and all times, listening to every word 
of cheer or warning muttered from dead or thundered 
from living lips, and moving down the solemn path- 
way of the ages, an image of just, intelligent, benefi- 
cent Power ! 



1857. 



VI. 

THE ENGLISH MIND. 

IT is hardly necessary for. us to say that a nation 
is not a mere aggregation of existing individu- 
als, or collection of provinces and colonies, but an 
organic living body of laws, institutions, manners, and 
literature, whose present condition is the result of the 
slow growth of ages, and whose roots stretch far back 
into the past life of the people. By a national mind 
we mean the whole moral and mental life of a 
nation, as embodied in its facts and latent in its 
sentiments and ideas. This body of mind, the organ- 
ization of centuries, exercises, in virtue of its mass, 
a positive attractive force on all individual minds 
within the sphere of its influence, compelling them 
to be partakers of the thoughts and passions of the 
national heart and brain, and receiving in return 
their contributions of individual thoughts and passions. 
Now a national mind is great according to the vitality 
and vigor at the centre of its being, the fidelity with 
which it resists whatever is foreign to its own na 



166 THE ENGLISH MIND. 

ture, and its consequent perseverance in its own 
inherent laws of development. Tried by these tests, 
that pyramidal organism, with John Bull at the base 
and Shakespeare at the apex, which we .call the 
English mind, is unexcelled, if not unequalled, in 
modern times for its sturdy force of being, its mus- 
cular strength of faculty, the variety of its directing 
sentiments, and its tough hold upon existence. No 
other national mind combines such vast and various 
creativeness, and presents so living a synthesis of 
seemingly elemental contradictions, which is at the 
same time marked by such distinctness of individual 
features. That imperial adjective, English, fits its 
sedition as well as its servility, its radicalism as well 
as its conservatism, its squalor as well as its splendor, 
its vice as well as its virtue, its morality and relig- 
ion as well as its politics and government. The 
unity of its nature is never lost in all the prodigious 
variety of its manifestation. Prince, peasant, Cavalier, 
Roundhead, Whig, Tory, poet, penny-a-liner, philan- 
thropist, ruffian, — William Wilberforce in Parliament, 
Richard Turpin on the York road, — all agree in 
being English, all agree in a common contempt, 
blatant or latent, for everything not English. Lib- 
erty is English, wisdom is English, philosophy is 
English, religion is English, earth is English, air is 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



167 



English, heaven is English, hell is English. And 
this imperious dogmatism, too, has none of the uneasy 
self-distrust which peeps through the vociferous brag 
of corresponding American phenomena ; but, express- 
ing its seated faith in egotism's most exquisite non 
sequiturs, it says stoutly, with Parson Adams, " A 
schoolmaster is the greatest of men, and I am the 
greatest of schoolmasters " ; and, moreover, it believes 
what it says. The quality is not in the tongue, but 
in the character of the nation. 

This solid self-confidence and pride of nationality, 
this extraordinary content with the image reflected in 
the mirror of self-esteem, indicates that the national 
mind is not tormented by the subtle sting of abstract 
opinions or the rebuking glance of unrealized ideals, 
but that its reason and imagination work on the level 
of its Will. The essential peculiarity, therefore, of 
the English Mind is its basis in Character, and con- 
sequent hold upon facts and disregard of abstractions. 
Coarse, strong, massive, sturdy, practical, — organizing 
its thoughts into faculties, and toughening its faculties 
into the consistency of muscle and bone, — its whole 
soul is so embodied and embrained, that it imprints 
on its most colossal mental labors the stern charac- 
teristics of sheer physical strength. It not only has 
fire, but fuel enough to feed its fire. Its thoughts 



168 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



are acts, its theories are institutions, its volitions are 
events. It has no ideas not inherent in its own 
organization, or which it has not assimilated and 
absorbed into its own nature by collision or com- 
munion with other national minds. It is enriched 
but never overpowered by thoughts and impulses 
from abroad, for whatever it receives it forces into 
harmony with its own broadening processes of inte- 
rior development. Thus the fiery, quick-witted, wilful 
and unscrupulous Norman encamped in its domains, 
and being unable to reject him, and its own stubborn 
vitality refusing to succumb, it slowly and sullenly, 
through long centuries, absorbed him into itself, and 
blended fierce Norman pride and swift Norman intel- 
ligence with its own solid substance of sense and 
humor. By the same jealous and resisting, but assim- 
ilative method, it gradually incorporated the principles 
of Roman law into its jurisprudence, and the spirit of 
Italian, Spanish, and German thought into its litera- 
ture, receiving nothing, however, which it did not 
modify with its own individuality, and scrawling 
" England, her mark," equally on what it borrowed 
and what it created. 

A national mind thus rooted in character, with an 
organizing genius directed by homely sentiments, and 
with its sympathies fastened on palpable aims and 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



169 



objects, has all the strength which comes from ideas 
invigorated but narrowed by facts. General maxims 
disturb it not, for it never acts from reason alone, 
or passi/m alone, or understanding alone ; but reason, 
passion, understanding, conscience, religious sentiment, 
are all welded together in its thoughts and actions, 
and pure reason, or pure conscience, or pure passion, 
it not only neglects, but stigmatizes. Its principles 
are precedents buttressed by prejudices, and these are 
obstinately asserted from force of character rather 
than reasoned out by force of intellect. " Taffy," 
said swearing Lord Chancellor Thurlow to Lord 
Kerry on, " you are obstinate, and give no reasons ; 
now Scott is obstinate, too, but he gives reasons, — 

and bad ones they are ! 99 

Indeed, the English mind believes what it practises, 
and practises what it believes, and is rarely weakened 
in its active power by perceiving a law of morality 
or intelligence higher than its own practical morality 
and intelligence. It meets all emergencies with expe- 
dients, and gives to its reasons the emphasis of its 
will. Bringing everything to the test of common 
sense and fact, it is blind to the operation cf the 
great laws of rectitude and retribution objective to 
itself, but trusts that the same practical sagacity and 
practical energy which have heretofore met real dan- 
8 



170 THE ENGLISH MIND. 

gers, will meet impending dangers when they become 
real. It has no forecasting science of right, but 
when self-preservation depends on its doing right, the 
most abstract requirements of justice will be " done 
into English " in as coarse and as sensible a way as 
its old hack-writers translated Juvenal and Plutarch. 
In the mean time it prefers to trust 

" In the good old plan, 
That they should take who have the power, 
That they should keep who can." 

Indeed, such a complete localization of thought, 
morality, and religion was never before witnessed 
in a civilized nation. It is content with the rela- 
tive and the realized in manners, laws, institutions, 
literature, and religion ; and it disowns the jurisdic- 
tion, and sulkily disregards the judgments, of absolute 
truth and morality. If its imperious and all-grasping 
tyranny provokes a province into just rebellion, na- 
tional statesmen send national warriors to put it 
down, and prayers are offered in national churches 
for the victory. The history of its Indian empire — 
an empire built up by the valor and crimes of Clive, 
and preserved by the serene remorselessness of 
Hastings's contriving intellect — is as interesting as 
the " Pirate's Own Book," and exhibits the triumph 
of similar principles ; but whatever is done for the 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



171 



national aggrandizement is not only vindicated but 
baptized ; and when Edmund Burke made the most 
desperate effort in the history of eloquence to induce 
the highest court of the realm to apply the Higher 
Law to the enormities of Hastings, he not only failed 
of success, but the English mind condemns him now 
for vituperating the character of " an eminent servant 
of the public." There is no crime in such matters 
but to fail in crime. We have heard, lately, many 
edifying and sonorous sentences quoted from English 
jurists about the law of God overriding the law of 
man ; but it is not remembered that when an Eng- 
lish jurist speaks of the law of God, he really means 
that fraction of it which he thinks has become, or is 
becoming, the law of England. To make a true 
Englishman responsible for any maxim which is 
essentially abstract, i/aorganic, w?iprecedented, and for- 
eign to the interior working of the national mind, is 
to misconceive both his meaning and his nature. No 
great English humorist — that is, no man who sees 
through phrases into characters — has ever blundered 
into such a mistake. The true localizing principle is 
hinted by Goldsmith's braggart theologian : " When 1 
say religion, I of course mean the Christian religion ; 
and when I say Christian religion, I would have you 
know, sir, that I mean the Church of England!" 



172 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



Now it is evident that a national mind thus proud 
and practical, thus individual and insular, making, as 
it does, the senses final, and almost deifying rank and 
property, would naturally exhibit in its manners and 
institutions a double aristocracy of blood and capital. 
Hence results the most hateful of English character- 
istics, — the disposition, we mean, of each order of 
English society to play the sycophant to the class 
above it, and the tyrant to the class below it ; though, 
from the inherent vigor and independence of the 
Englishman's nature, his servility is often but the 
mask of his avarice or hatred. The best representa- 
tive of this unamiable combination of arrogance and 
meanness is that full-blown Briton, or, as Parr would 
have called him, that " ruffian in ermine/' Lord Chan- 
cellor Thurlow, who could justly claim the rare dis- 
tinction of being the greatest bully and the greatest 
parasite of his time. But this peculiarity is com- 
monly modified by nobler and sturdier qualities, and 
the nation is especially felicitous in the coarse but 
strong practical morality which is the life of its man- 
ners. The fundamental principles of social order are 
never brought into question by the average English 
mind, and even its sensuality is honest and hearty, 
unsophisticated by that subtile refinement of thinking 
by which a Frenchman will blandly violate the tea 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



173 



commandments on philosophic principles, and with 
hardly the disturbance of a single rule of etiquette. 
In the domestic virtues likewise, — in those attach- 
ments which cluster round a family and a home, — 
the Englishman is pre-eminent. The Frenchman is 
wider and more generous in his generalities, more of 
a universal philanthropist ; but his joy is out of doors, 
and he would hardly, if he could help it, dine at 
home for the salvation of mankind. But political 
liberty is only for those who have homes and love 
them ; and though the Englishman's theories are nar- 
row, they are facts, while the Frenchman's, if more 
expansive, are unrealized. 

The leading defect of English manners, however, 
is consequent on their chief merit. Being the natural 
expression of the national mind, all the harshness as 
well as all the honesty of the people is sincerely ex- 
pressed in them ; and they press especially hard on 
the poor and the helpless. In the mode of conduct- 
ing political disputes, in the ferocity and coarseness 
of political and personal libels, and in the habit of 
calling unpleasant objects by their most unpleasan* 
names, we perceive the national contempt of all the 
decent draperies which mental refinement casts ovei 
sensual tastes and aggressive passions. The literature 
of the nation strikingly exhibits this ingrained coarse 



174 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



ness at the foundation of its mind, and its greatest 
poets and novelists are full of it in their delineations 
of manners and character. Chaucer and Shakespeare 
humorously represent it ; Ben Jonson and Fielding, 
the two most exclusively English of all England's 
imaginative writers, are at once its happy expounders 
and bluff exponents ; and Swift, whose large Saxon 
brain was rendered fouler by misanthropy, absolutely 
riots in the gutter. This robust manhood, anchored 
deep in strong sensations and rough passions, gives 
also a peculiar pugnacity to English manners. No 
man can rise there who cannot stand railing, stand 
invective, stand ridicule, "stand fight." Force of 
character bears remorselessly down on everything and 
everybody that resists it, and no man is safe who 
cannot emphasize the " me." This harshness is a sign 
of lusty health and vigor, and doubtless educates men 
by opposition into self-reliance ; but woe unto those 
it crushes ! Thus a friend of ours once strayed, in 
the early part of the present century, into the Court 
of King's Bench, where Lord Ellenborough then sat 
in all the insolence of office, and where Mr. Garrow, 
the great cross-examining advocate, then wantoned in 
all the arrogance of witness-badgering. The first ob- 
ject that arrested his attention was a middle-aged 
woman, whose plump red face and full form displayed 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



175 



no natural tendency to disorders of the nerves, but 
who was now very palpably in a violent fit of hys- 
terics. Shocked at this exhibition, he asked a by- 
stander the cause of her extraordinary emotion. 
"0," was the indifferent reply, "she is a witness 
who has just been cross-examined by Mr. Garrow." 

As English manners grew naturally out of English 
character, so England's social and political institutions 
have grown naturally out of English manners, and all 
are hieroglyphics of national qualities. They express, 
in somewhat grotesque forms and combinations, the 
thoughts and sentiments of the ruling classes from age 
to age. Springing originally out of the national heart 
and brain, we may be sure that, however absurd and 
even inhuman some of them may now appear, they 
served a practical purpose, and met a national want, 
at the period of their establishment ; and though the 
forms in which the national life is embodied are clung 
to with a prejudice which sometimes boils into fanat- 
ical fury, and though the dead body of an institution 
is often fondly retained long after its spirit is de- 
parted, this sullen conservative bigotry gives stability 
and working power to the government amidst the 
wildest storms of faction, and its evils are moderated 
by a kind of reluctant reason and justice, which in 
the long run gets the mastery. Thus the constitution 



176 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



of the House of Commons, before the Reform Bill of 
1832, was not fitted to the altered circumstances of 
the nation, and the reformers really adhered to the 
principle of English popular representation in their 
almost revolutionary changes in its forms ; but it 
would be a great error to suppose that in the 
unreformed House of Commons legislation did not 
regard the interest of unrepresented constituencies, be- 
cause it abstractly had the power to disregard them. 
Such an impolitic exercise of political monopoly 
would have reformed the representation a hundred 
years ago. So was it, less than half a century ago, 
with the horrible severity of the criminal law, which 
made small thefts capital crimes, punishable with 
death. Conservatives like Eldon and Ellenborough 
opposed their repeal as vehemently as if the national 
safety depended on their remaining as scarecrows on 
the statute books, though as judges they would no 
more have executed them than they would have 
committed murder. It is understood in England that 
when the national mind outgrows a law, " its inactiv- 
ity," in Plunket's phrase, "is its only excuse for ex- 
istence," though to propose its repeal is to incur the 
imputation of Jacobinism. " The wisdom of our an- 
cestors," is the Englishman's reverent phrase as he 
contemplates these gems from- the antique; but we 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



177 



should do injustice both to his humanity and his 
shrewdness, did we reason deductively from them to 
results, as though they were still living institutions, 
issuing now in ghastly facts. He keeps the withered 
and ugly symbols of his old bigotries for ornament, 
not for use ! 

Indeed, this unreasoning devotion to organic forms, 
even after they have lost all organic life, is ever 
accompanied by a sagacity which swiftly accommo- 
dates itself to emergencies ; and the sense of the 
people never shines so resplendently as in avoiding 
the full logical consequences of its nonsense, — which 
nonsense we shall find had commonly its origin in 
sense. Thus the abject theory of the Divine Right 
of Kings was a politic and convenient fiction, in the 
early days of the English Reformation, to ^operate 
against the Jesuit theory of the sovereignty of the 
people, by which the Papists hoped to re-establish 
Romanism ; but when Protestant kings carried the 
theory out into practice, the genius of the people as 
easily extemporized a divine right of regicide and 
revolution. But while the original theory was politic, 
either as a weapon against Romanism or faction, it 
is curious to observe how eagerly it w 7 as inculcated 
by the national Church as a part of religion. South, 
speaking of deadly sins, refers to "blaspheming God, 
8* L 



178 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



disobeying the King, and the like " ; and even the 
heavenly-minded Taylor asserts, in perhaps the great- 
est of his sermons, " that perfect submission to kings 
is the glory of the Protestant cause " ; and this per- 
fect submission, not to the constitution and the laws, 
but to the king, he proceeds, with superb sophistries, 
to invest with the dignity of one of those Christian 
works which are the signs of Christian faith. But 
the moment that James the Second laid a rough hand 
on the established safeguards of the property, lives, 
and religion of the nation, the whole people fell away 
from him ; the Tory who preached submission as a 
duty, and the Whig who claimed rebellion as a right, 
were both instantly united in a defence of their com- 
mon English heritage ; and a tempest of opposition 
arose whose breath blew the monarch from his 
throne. 

And this brings us to the consideration of the con- 
crete and national character of English freedom, 
which, having its foundations deep in the manners of 
the people, and having organized its ideas in pro- 
tecting institutions, has withstood all assaults because 
it has ever been intrenched in facts. The national 
genius embodies, incarnates, realizes all its sentiments 
and thoughts. Establishing rights by the hard pro- 
cess of growth and development, it holds them with a 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



179 



giant's grasp. Seeing in them the grotesque reflec- 
tion of its own anomalous nature, it loves them with 
the rude tenderness of a lioness for her whelps. It 
cares little for abstract liberty, but it will defend 
its liberties to the death. It cares little for the 
Eights of Man, but for the rights of English man it 
will fight " till from its bones the flesh be hacked." 
It cares little for grand generalities about liberty, 
equality, and fraternity ; but, swearing lusty oaths, and 
speaking from the level of character, it bluntly in- 
forms rulers that, loving property, it will pay no 
taxes which it does not itself impose, and that, being 
proud, it will stand no invasion of its inherited prop- 
erty of political privileges. It will allow the gov- 
ernment to exercise almost tyrannical power provided 
it violates no established forms of that Liberty, 
ft whose limbs were made in England." Its attach- 
ment to the externals of its darling rights has a 
gruff pugnacity and mastiff-like grip, which some- 
times exhibit the obstinate strength of stupidity itself, 
— a quality which Sheridan happily hit off when he 
objected in Parliament to a tax on mile-stones, be- 
cause, he said, "they were a race who could not 
meet to remonstrate." So strong is its realizing fac- 
ulty, so intensely does it live in the concrete, that it 
forces every national thought into an institution. 



180 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



Thus it found rough rebellious qualities seated deep 
in its arrogant nature, and demanding expression. 
These first found vent in bloody collisions with its 
rulers, but eventually battled themselves into laws by 
which resistance was legalized ; and thus the homely 
but vigorous imagination of the English Mind, or- 
ganizing by instinct, at last succeeded in the stu- 
pendous effort of consummating the wedlock of liberty 
and order by organizing even insurrection, and forcing 
anarchy itself to wear the fetters of form. This, we 
need not say, is the greatest achievement in the art 
of politics that the world has ever seen ; and Eng- 
land and the United States are the only nations 
which have yet been able to perform it. Any' child 
can prattle prettily about human rights and resistance 
to tyrants ; but to tame the wild war-horses of radical 
passions, and compel their hot energies to subserve 
the purposes of reason, is the work of a full-grown 
and experienced man. 

We now come to a most delicate topic, which can 
hardly be touched without offence, or avoided with- 
out an oversight of the most grotesque expression of 
the English Mind. The determining sentiments of the 
people are to war, industry, and general individual and 
material aggrandizement, — to things human rather 
than to things divine ; but every true Englishman, 



THE .ENGLISH MIND. 



181 



nowever much of a practical Atheist he may be, feels 
a genuine horror of infidelity, and always has a religion 
to swear by, and, if need be, to fight for. He makes 
it — we are speaking of the worldling — subordinate to 
English laws and customs, Anglicizes it, and never 
allows it to interfere with his selfish or patriotic ser- 
vice to his country, or with the gratification of his 
passions ; but he still believes it, and, what is more, 
believes that he himself is one of its edifying expo- 
nents. This gives a delicious unconscious hypocrisy 
to the average national mind, which has long been 
the delight and the butt of English humorists. Its 
most startling representative was the old swearing, 
drinking, licentious, chureh-and-king Cavalier, who was 
little disposed, the historian tells us, to shape his life 
according to the precepts of the Church, but who 
was always "ready to fight knee-deep in blood for 
her cathedrals and palaces, for every line of her ru- 
bric, and every thread of her vestments." Two cen- 
turies ago, Mrs. Aphra Behn described the English 
squire as "going to church every Sunday morning, 
to set a good example to the lower orders, and as 
getting the parson drunk every Sunday night to show 
his respect for the Church." Goldsmith, in that ex- 
quisite sketch wherein he records the comments made 
by representative men of various classes on tho 



182 THE ENGLISH MIND. 

probable effects of a political measure, makes his 
soldier rip out a tremendous oath as a pious prelim- 
inary to the expression of his fear that the meas- 
ure in question will ruin the Church. The cry, 
raised generally by cunning politicians, that " the 
Church is in danger," is sure to stir all the ferocity, 
stupidity, and ruffianism of the nation in its support. 
Religion in England is, in fact, a part of politics, and 
therefore the most worldly wear its badges. Thus all 
English warriors, statesmen, and judges are religious 
men, but the religion is ever subordinate to the 
profession or business in hand. " Mr. Whitefield," 
said Lord George Sackville, condescendingly, "you 
may preach to my soldiers, provided you say nothing 
against the articles of war." Mr. Prime Minister 
Pitt spends six days of the week in conducting a 
bloody war to defend the political, and especially the 
religious institutions of England against the diabolical 
designs of French Atheists and Jacobins, and on 
Sunday morning fights a duel on "Wimbledon Com- 
mon. Sometimes the forms of religion are conde- 
scendingly patronized because they are accredited 
marks of respectability. Percival Stockdale tells us 
that he was appointed chaplain to a man-of-war, sta- 
tioned at Plymouth, but found it difficult to exercise 
his functions. He at last directly requested the cap- 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



183 



tain to allow him to read prayers. "Well," said 
the officer, " you had better, Mr. Stockdale, begin 
next Sunday, as I suppose this thing must be done 
as long as Christianity is about." But perhaps the 
quaintest example of this combination of business 
and theology is found in that English judge, who 
was condemning to death, under the old barbarous 
law, a person who had forged a one-pound note. 
Lord Campbell tells us that, after exhorting the 
criminal to prepare for another world, he added : 
"And I trust that, through the mediation and merits 
of our blessed Redeemer, you may there experience 
that mercy which a due regard to the credit of the 
paper currency of the country forbids you to hope 
for here" Indeed, nothing could more forcibly de- 
monstrate how complete is the organization of the 
English Mind than this interpenetration of the form 
of the religious element with its most earthly aims ; 
and therefore it is that the real piety of the nation, 
whether ritual or evangelical, is so sturdy and active, 
and passes so readily from Christian doctrines into 
Christian virtues. In its best expressions it is some- 
what local ; but what it loses in transcendent breadth 
and elevation of sentiment it gains in practical fac- 
ulty to perform every-day duties. 

We must have performed this analysis of the level 



184 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



English Mind with a shameful obtuseness, if we have 
not all along indicated and implied its capacity to 
produce and nurture great and strong men of action 
and men of thought. It has, in truth, been singu 
larly fertile in forcible individuals, whose character! 
have the compound raciness of national and persona' 
peculiarity, and relish of the soil whence they sprung 
Few of these, however cosmopolitan may have been 
their manners, or comprehensive their reason, have 
escaped the gra-p of that gravitation by which the 
great mother mind holds to her knee her most ca- 
pricious and her most colossal children. Let us look 
at this brood of giants in an ascending scale of in- 
tellectual precedence, fastening first on those who are 
nearest the common heart and represent most exclu- 
sively the character of the nation's general mind. 
Foremost among these is Sir Edward Coke, the 
leviathan of the common law, and the sublime of 
common sense, — a man who could have been pro- 
duced only by the slow gestation of centuries, Eng- 
lish in bone and blood and brain. Stout as an oak, 
though capable of being yielding as a willow ; with 
an intellect tough, fibrous, holding with a Titanic 
clutch its enormity of acquisition ; with a disposition 
hard, arrogant, obstinate, just ; and with a heart ava- 
ricious of wealth and power, scorning all weak and 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 185 

most amiable emotions, but clinging, in spite of its 
selfish fits and starts of servility, to English laws, 
customs, and liberties, with the tenacity of mingled 
instinct and passion ; the man looms up before us, 
rude, ungenerous, and revengeful, as when he insulted 
Bacon in his abasement, and roared out " spider of 
hell" to Raleigh in his unjust impeachment, yet 
rarely losing that stiff, daring spirit which drafted the 
immortal " Petition of Right," and that sour and sul- 
len honesty which told the messenger of James I., 
who came to command him to prejudge a case in 
which the king's prerogative was concerned, " when 
the case happens, I shall do that which will be fit 
for a judge to do." Less hard, equally brave, and 
more genial, Chief Justice Holt stands before us, 
with his English force of understanding, sagacity of 
insight, fidelity to facts, and fear of nothing but — ■ 
the tongue of Lady Holt ; wise, and with a slight 
conceit of his wisdom ; a man who has no doubts 
that laws should be executed and that rogues should 
be hanged, and before the shrewd glance of whose 
knowing eye sophism instantly dwindles, and all the 
bubbles of fanaticism incontinently collapse. Thus he 
once committed a blasphemous impostor by the name 
of Atkins, who belonged to a sect, half cheats, half 
gulls, called "The Prophets" One of the brother- 



186 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



hood immediately waited on him and said authorita 
tively, " I come to you, a prophet from the Lord 
God, who has sent me to thee, and would have thee 
grant a nolle prosequi to John Atkins, his servant, 
whom thou hast sent to prison." Such a demand 
might have puzzled some judges, but Holt's grim 
humor and English sagacity darted at once to the 
point which betrayed the falsity of the fanatic's claim. 
" Thou art a false prophet and lying knave," he 
answered. " If the Lord God had sent thee, it would 
have 'been to the Attorney- General, for He knows 
that it belongeth not to the Chief Justice to grant a 
nolle prosequi. But I, as Chief Justice, can grant 
you a warrant to bear him company," — which, it is 
unnecessary to add, he immediately did. The mas- 
culine spirit of .Coke and Holt is visible in all the 
great English lawyers and magistrates, refined into a 
graceful firmness in Hardwicke, caricatured in the 
bluff, huffing, swearing imperiousness of Thurlow, and 
finding in Eldon, who combined Thurlow's bigotry 
with Hardwicke's courtesy, its latest representative. 

In respect to the statesmen of England, we will 
pass over many small, sharp, snapping minds, emi- 
nent as red-tape officials and ministers of routine, f.nd 
many commanding intellects and men versed in af- 
fairs, in order that we may the more emphasize the 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



187 



name of Chatham, who, though it was said of him 
that he knew nothing perfectly but Barrow's Sermons 
and Spenser's Faerie Queene, is pre-eminent among 
English statesmen for the union of the in tensest na- 
tionality with the most thoroughgoing force of imagi- 
nation and grandest elevation of sentiment. Feeling 
the glory and the might of his country throbbing in 
every pulsation of his heroic heart, he was himself 
the nation individualized, could wield all its resources 
cf spirit and power, and, while in office, penetrated, 
animated, kindled, the whole people with his own fiery 
and invincible soul. As a statesman, he neither had 
comprehension of understanding nor the timidity in 
action which often accompanies it ; but, a hero and 
a man of genius, he was fertile in great conceptions, 
destitute of all moral fear, on fire with patriotic en- 
thusiasm. Possessing a clear and bright vision of 
some distant and fascinating, but seemingly inaccessi- 
ble object, and bearing down all opposition with a 
will as full of the heat of his genius as his concep- 
tion was with its light, he went crashing through all 
intervening obstacles right to his mark, and then 
proudly pointed to his success in justification of his 
processes. In a lower sphere of action, and with a 
patriotism less ideal, but still glorious with the beau- 
tiful audacity and vivid vision of genius, is that most 



188 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



heroic of English naval commanders, Nelson. Bear 
ing in his brain an original plan of attack, and 
flashing his own soul into the roughest sailor at the 
guns, fleet after fleet sunk or dispersed as they came 
into collision with that indomitable valor guided by 
that swift, sure, far-darting mind. His heroism, how- 
ever, was pervaded through and through with the 
vulgarest prejudices of the common English seaman. 
His three orders to his men when he took the com 
mand on the opening of the French war sound like 
the voice of England herself ; first, u to obey orders 
implicitly ; second, to consider every man their enemy 
who spoke ill of the King ; and, third, to hate a 
Frenchman as they did the Devil." 

In ascending from men eminent in action to men 
renowned in thought, we are almost overwhelmed by 
the thick throng of names, illustrious in scientific 
discovery and literary creation, which crowd upon 
the attention. Leaving out of view the mass of 
originating genius which has been, drawn into the 
service of the nation's applying talent, in the vast 
field of its industrial labors, what a proof of the 
richness, depth, strength, variety, and unity of the 
English Mind is revealed in its literature alone. 
This bears the impress of the same nationality which 
characterizes its manners and institutions, but a 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



189 



nationality more or less refined, ennobled, and ex- 
alted. If we observe the long line of its poets, 
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Pope, 
Byron, with hardly the exceptions of Spenser, Mil- 
ton, and Wordsworth, we shall find that, however 
exalted, divinized, some of them may be in imagina- 
tion and sentiment, and however palpable may be 
the elements of thought they have assimilated directly 
from visible nature or other literatures, they still all 
rest on the solid base of English character, all par- 
take of the tough English force, 

u And of that fibre, quick and strong, 
Whose throbs are love, whose thrills are song." 

Though they shoot up from the level English mind 
to almost starry heights, their feet are always firm 
on English ground. Their ideal elevation is ever 
significant of the tremendous breadth and visror of 
their actual characters. Mountain peaks that cleave 
the air of another world, with heaven's most purple 
glories playing on their summits, their broad founda- 
tions are still immovably fixed on the earth. It is, 
as the poet says of the Alps, " Earth climbing to 
heaven." This reality of manhood gives body and 
human interest to their loftiest ecstasies of creative 
passion, for the superlative is ever vitalized by the 
positive force which urges it up, and never mimics 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



the crazy fancy of Oriental exaggeration. When to 
the impassioned imagination of Shakespeare's lover 
the eyes of his mistress became "lights that do mis- 
lead the Morn," we have a more than Oriental extrav- 
agance ; but in the shock of sweet surprise it gives 
our spirits there is no feeling of the unnatural or 
the bizarre. 

Observe, again, that portion of English literature 
which relates to the truisms and the problems of 
morality, philosophy, and religion. Now, no didactic 
writing in the world is so parched and mechanical as 
the English, as long as it deals dryly with gener- 
alities ; but the moment a gush of thought comes 
charged with the forces of character, truisms instantly 
freshen into truths, and the page is all alive and 
inundated with meaning. Dr. Johnson is sometimes, 
with cruel irony, called "the great English moralist," 
in which capacity he is often the most stupendously 
tiresome of all moralizing word-pilers ; but Dr. John- 
son, the high-chuKchman and Jacobite, pouring out his 
mingled tide of reflection and prejudice, hating Whig-, 
snarling at Milton, and saying " You lie, sir," to an 
opponent, is as racy as Montaigne or Swift. Ascend- 
ing higher into the region of English philosophy, we 
shall find that the peculiarity of the great English 
thinker is, that he grapples a subject, not with hia 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



191 



understanding alone, but with his whole nature, ex- 
tends the empire of the concrete into the region of 
pure speculation, and, unlike the German and French- 
man, builds not on abstractions, but on conceptions 
which are o'erinformed with his individual life and 
experience. Hobbes and Locke, in their metaphysics, 
draw their own portraits as unmistakably as Milton 
and Wordsworth do theirs in their poetry. This pecu- 
liarity tends to make all English thought relative, but 
what it loses in universality it more than gains in 
energy, in closeness to things, and in power to kin- 
dle thought in all minds brought within its influence. 
The exception to this statement, as far as regards 
universality, is found in that puzzle of critical science, 
" Nature's darling" and marvel, Shakespeare, who, 
while he comprehends England, is not comprehended 
by it, but stands, in some degree, not only for Eng- 
lish but for modern thought ; and perhaps Bacon's ca- 
pacious and beneficent intellect, whether we consider 
the ethical richness of its tone or the beautiful com- 
prehensiveness of its germinating maxims, can hardly 
be deemed, to use his own insular image, "an island 
cut off from other men's lands, but rather a conti- 
nent that joins to them." Still, accepting generally 
those limitations of English thought which result from 
its intense vitality and nationality, we are not likely 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



to mourn much over its relative narrowness, if we 
place it by the side of the barren amplitude, or 
ample barrenness, of abstract thinking. Take, for ex- 
ample, any great logician, with his mastery of logi- 
cal processes, and compare him with a really great 
reasoner of the wide, conceptive genius of Hooker, or 
Chillingworth, or Barrow, or Burke, with his mastery 
of logical premises, and, in respect to mental enlight- 
enment alone, do you not suppose that the clean and 
clear, but unproductive understanding of the passion- 
less dialectician will quickly dwindle before the mas- 
sive nature of the creative thinker ? The fabrics of 
reason, indeed, require not only machinery but ma- 
terials. 

As a consequence of this ready interchange of re- 
flective and creative reason in the instinctive opera- 
tion of the English mind, its poets are philosophers, 
and. . its philosophers are poets. The old English 
drama, from its stout beginning in Marlowe's kt con 
sistent mightiness" and u w r orkin£ word.-," until it 
melted in the flushed, wild-eyed voluptuousness of 
Fletcher's fancy, and again hardened in the sensual- 
ized sense of Wycherley's satire and the diamond 
glitter of Congreve's wit, is all aglow w r ith the fire 
and fierceness of impassioned reason^ Dry den argues 
in annihilating sarcasms and radiant metaphors ; Pope 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



193 



runs ethics into rhythm and epigrams. In the relig- 
ious poets *of the school of Herbert and Vaughan, 
a curious eye is continually seen peering into the 
dusky corners of insoluble problems, and metaphysic 
niceties are vitally inwrought with the holy quaint- 
ness of their meditations, and the wild-rose perfume 
of their sentiments ; and, in the present century, the 
knottiest problems of philosophy have come to us 
touched and irradiated with the ethereal imaginations 
of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Coleridge, or shot pas- 
sionately out from the hot heart of Byron. 

But, reluctantly leaving themes which might tempt 
to wearying digressions, we wish to add a word or 
two respecting the mental characteristics of four men 
who are pre-eminently the glory of the English intel- 
lect, — Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Newton ; 
and if the human mind contains more wondrous fac- 
ulties than these exhibit, we know them not. The 
essential quality of Chaucer is the deep, penetrating, 
Dantean intensity of his single conceptions, which go 
right to the heart of the objects conceived, so that 
there is an absolute contact of thought and thing 
without any interval. These conceptions, however, 
he gives in succession, not in combination ; and the 
supreme greatness of Shakespeare's almost celestial 
strength is seen in this, that while he conceives as 

9 M 



194 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



intensely as Chaucer, he has the further power of 
combining diverse conceptions into a complex whole, 
"vital in every part," and of flashing the marvellous 
combination at once upon the mind in words that 
are things. Milton does not possess this poetic com- 
prehensiveness of conception and combination ; but 
he stands before us as perhaps the grandest and 
mightiest individual man in literature, — a man who 
transmuted all thoughts, passions, acquisitions, and 
aspirations into the indestructible substance of personal 
character. Assimilating and absorbing into his own, 
nature the spirit of English Puritanism, he starts from 
a firm and strong, though somewhat narrow base ; but, 
like an inverted pyramid, he broadens as he ascends, 
and soars at last into regions so exalted and so holy 
that his song becomes, in his own divine words, " the 
majestic image of a high and stately drama, shutting 
up and intermingling her solemn scenes and acts 
with a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping 
symphonies ! " It would not become us here to 
speak of Newton, — although, in the exhaustless cre- 
ativeness of his imagination, few poets have equalled 
him, — except to note the union in his colossal char- 
acter of boundless inventiveness with an austere Eng- 
lish constancy to the object in view. His mind, when 
on the trail of discovery, was infinitely fertile in the 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



195 



most original and ingenious guesses, conjectures, and 
hypotheses, and his life might have been barren of 
scientific results had he yielded himself to their soft 
fascination ; but in that great, calm mind they were 
tested and discarded with the same rapid ease that 
marked their conception; and the persistent Genius, 
pitched far beyond the outmost walls of positive 
knowledge, 

" Went sounding on«its dim and perilous way! " 
In these remarks on the English Mind, with their 
insufficient analysis of incomplete examples, and the 
result, it may be, of a most " scattering and unsure 
observance," we have at least endeavored to follow it 
as it creeps, and catch a vanishing view of it as it 
soars, without subjecting the facts of its organic life to 
any misleading rhetorical exaggeration ' or embellish- 
ment. We have attempted the description of this 
transcendent star in the constellation of nationalities, 
as we would describe any of those great products of 
nature whose justification is found in their existence. 
Yet we are painfully aware how futile is the effort 
to sketch in a short essay characteristics which have 
taken ten centuries of the energies of a nation to 
evolve; but, speaking to those who know something 
by descent and experience of the virtues and the 
vices of the English blood, we may have hinted what 



196 



THE ENGLISH MIND. 



we could not represent. For this proud and practi- 
cal, this arrogant and insular England, 

" Whose shores beat back the ocean's foamy feet," 

is the august mother of nations destined to survive 
her ; has sown, by her bigotry and rapacity, no less 
than her enterprise, the seeds of empires all over 
the earth ; and from the English Mind as its germ 
has sprung our own somewhat heterogeneous but 
rapidly organizing American Mind, worthy, as we 
think, of its parentage, and intended, as we trust, 
for a loftier and more comprehensive dominion ; dis- 
tinguished, unlike the English, by a mental hospital- 
ity which eagerly receives, and a mental energy 
which quickly assimilates, the blended life-streams of 
various nationalities ; with a genius less persistent, 
but more sensitive and flexible ; with a freedom less 
local ; with ideas larger and more generous ; with a 
past, it may be, less rich in memories, but with a 
future more glorious in hopes. 



THACKERAY. 



HE death of Thackeray has elicited from the 



J- press both of England and the United States a 
series of warm testimonials to the genius of the 
writer and the character of the man. The majority 
of them bear the marks of proceeding from personal 
friends or acquaintances, and the majority of them 
resent with special heat the imputation that the ob- 
ject of their eulogy was, in any respect, a cynic. A 
shrewd suspicion arises that such agreement in select- 
ing the topic of defence indicates an uneasy conscious- 
ness of a similar agreement, in the reading public, 
as to the justice of the charge. If this were so, we 
should think the question was settled against the 
eulogists. As the inmost individuality of a man of 
genius inevitably escapes in his writings, and as the 
multitude of readers judge of him by the general 
impression his works have left on their minds, their 
intelligent verdict in regard to his real disposition 
and nature carries with it more authority than the 




198 



THACKERAY. 



testimony of his chance companions. Acres of evi- 
dence concerning the correct life and benevolent 
feelings of Smollett and Wieland can blind no dis- 
cerning eye to the palpable fact that sensuality and 
misanthropy entered largely into the composition of 
the author of "Roderick Random," and that a profound 
disbelief in what commonly goes under the name of 
virtue, and a delight in toying with voluptuous images, 
characterized the historian of " Agathon." The world 
has little to do with the outward life a man of gen- 
ius privately leads, in comparison with the inward 
life he universally diffuses; and an author who con 
trives to impress fair-minded readers that his mind 
is tainted with cynical views of man and society, can 
hardly pass as a genial lover of his race on the 
strength of certificates that he has performed indi- 
vidual acts of kindness and good-will. The question 
relates -to the kind of influence he exercises on those 
he has never seen or known. What this influence 
is, in the case of Thackeray, we by no means think 
is expressed in so blunt and rough a term as "cyn- 
ical," and those who use it must be aware that it 
but coarsely conveys the notion they have of the 
individuality of the writer they seek to characterize. 
But clear perceptions often exist in persons who 
lack the power, or shirk the labor, of giving exact 



THACKERAY. 



199 



definitions ; and among the readers of Thackeray who 
quietly take in the subtile essence of his personality, 
there is less disagreement in their impressions than 
in their statements. To give what seems to us a fair 
transcript of the general feeling respecting the writer 
and the man will be the object of the present 
paper. 

And, first, to exclude him at once from the class 
and company of the great masters of characterization, 
we must speak of his obvious limitations. He is 
reported to have said of himself, that he " had no 
head above his eyes " ; and a man who has no head 
above his eyes is not an observer after the fashion 
of Shakespeare, or Cervantes, or Goethe, or Scott, or 
even of Fielding. The eye observes only what the 
mind, the heart, and the imagination are gifted to 
see ; and sight must be reinforced by insight before 
souls can be discerned as well as manners, ideas as 
well as objects, realities and relations as well as ap- 
pearances and accidental connections. 

But, without taking an epigram of humorous self- 
depreciation as the statement of a fact, it is still 
{Jain that Thackeray was not a philosopher or a 
poet, in the sense in which a great novelist or dram- 
atist possesses the qualities of either. He had no 
conception of causes and principles, no grasp of hu- 



200 



THACKERAY. 



man nature, as distinguished from the peculiarities of 
individuals, no perception of the invisible foundations 
of visible things, no strictly creative power. The 
world drifted before his eyes as his stories drift to 
their conclusion ; and as to tlie meaning or purpose 
or law of the phenomenon, he neither knew nor 
sought to know. This peculiar scepticism, the result 
not of the exercise, but the absence, of philosophical 
thought, is characteristic of the " Bohemian " view of 
life ; and, among a certain class, whose ideal of wis- 
dom is not so much to know as to be " knowing," 
this ignorant indifference to principles is one of 
Thackeray's chief claims to distinction. His philoso- 
phy is the vanity of all things, and the enjoyment 
of as many as you can. His superficiality in this 
respect is evident the moment we pass to some 
dramatist or novelist who seizes the substance of 
human nature and human life, and represents things 
in their vital relations, instead of in the mechanical 
juxtaposition in which they " happen " to be observed. 
Shakespeare's plot, for example, is a combination of 
events ; Thackeray's story, a mere procession of inci- 
dents. Shakespeare knew woman as well as women, 
and created Cleopatra and Cordelia ; Thackeray 
sharply scrutinized a certain number of women, and 
fashioned Becky Sharp and Amelia. The gulf be- 



THACKERAY. 



201 



tween tne two writers, in respect to naturalness, to 
a knowledge of human nature, and to individual 
characterizations, is as wide as that which yawned 
between Lazarus and Dives. They never can be 
brought into the same class, without a flippant and 
heedless oversight of the distinction between kinds 
of genius, and of their different positions in the slid- 
ing-scale of minds. 

Connected with this lack of high thought and im- 
agination, is a lack of great passions, and an absence 
of sympathy with them in life. They are outside of 
Thackeray's world. When he touches on them, it is 
with a fleer of incredulity: he has a suspicion of 
private theatricals ; he is curious to see the dressing 
for the part ; he keeps a bright lookout to detect the 
stage-strut in the hero's stride, and ironically encores 
the impassioned declamation. In nothing does he 
better succeed in taking the romance from life, than 
in this oversight of the reality of great passions in 
his quick penetration through all the masks of their 
imitators. He is so bent on stripping the king's 
robes from the limbs of the thief, that he has lost 
the sense of kingly natures. His world is, to a 
great extent, a world in which the grand and the 
noble are " left out in the cold," and the prominence 
given to the mean and the common. He takes the 
9* 



202 



THACKERAY. 



real heart and vitality out of mankind, calls what 
remains by the name of human nature, and adopts 
a theory of life which makes all history impossible, 
— except the " History of Pendennis." An amusing 
illustration of this defect is observable in one of his 
" Roundabout Papers," written during the Confederate 
Rebellion. He had travelled all over the United 
States with the sharpest eye that any tourist ever 
brought with him across the Atlantic ; but he saw 
nothing of the essential character of the people, and 
he could not for the life of him imagine, after his 
return, why we went to war. While North and 
South were engaged in their fierce death -grapple, he 
had no perception of the ideas at stake, or the pas- 
sions in operation. He took a kindly view of both 
parties in the contest. " How hospitable they were, 
those Southern men ! " They gave him excellent 
'claret in New Orleans. " Find me," he says, " speak- 
ing ill of such a country ! " A Southern acquaint- 
ance sent him a case of Medoc, just as he was 
starting for a voyage up the Mississippi. "Where 
are you," he exclaims, " honest friends, who gave me 
of your kindness and your cheer? May I be con- 
siderably boiled, blown up, and snagged, if I speak 
hard words of you. May claret turn sour ere I do ! " 
This may be geniality, but it is the geniality of in- 



THACKERAY. 



203 



difference to great things. A nation in its death- 
throes, — one side passionately battling for the most 
gigantic of shams as well as iniquities, — the land 
flooded with blood, — and still the good-natured "de- 
lineator of human nature" utterly unable to account 
for the strange phenomena, is only sure that the 
Southerners cannot be so bad and wrong as they 
are represented, for did they not give him "that 
excellent light claret"? 

Another defect of Thackeray, and the consequence 
of those we have mentioned, is the limitation of the 
range of his observation and the comparative poverty 
of his materials. Because he confines himself to the 
delineation of actual life, he is sometimes absurdly 
considered to include it, when, in fact, he only in- 
cludes a portion, and that a relatively small portion. 
A man may have a wide experience of the world 
without knowing experimentally much of Thackeray's 
world; and those whose knowledge of the world is 
chiefly confined to what they obtain from the novel- 
ists of manners and society, soon learn that Thack- 
eray's predecessors and Thackeray's contemporaries 
contain much which Thackeray overlooks. He is 
only one of a large number of observers, each with 
a special aptitude for some particular province of 
actual life, each repairing certain deficiencies of the 



204 



THACKERAY. 



others, and all combined falling short of the immense 
variety of the facts. In his own domain he is a 
master, but his mastery comes from his keen and 
original perception of what has been frequently ob- 
served before, rather than from his discovery of a 
new field of observation. After generalizing the 
knowledge of life and the types of character w r e have 
obtained through his writings, we find they are not 
so much additions to our knowledge as verifications 
and revivals of it. The form rather than the sub- 
stance is what is new, and the superficiality of 
thought underlying the whole representation is often 
painfully evident. The maxims which may be de- 
duced from the incidents and characters would make 
but an imperfect manual of practical wisdom. 

We now come, by the method of exclusion, to the 
positive qualities of Thackeray, and to the direction 
and scope of his powers. Gifted originally with a 
joyous temperament, a vigorous understanding, a 
keen sensibility, and a decided, though somewhat in- 
dolent self-reliance, he appears, before he came before 
the world as a writer, to have seen through most of 
the ordinary forms of human pretension, and to have 
had a considerable experience of human rascality. 
He lost a fortune in the process of learning the 
various vanities, follies, and artifices he afterwards 



THACKERAY. 



205 



exposed, and thus may be considered to have fairly 
earned the right to be their satirist. A man who 
has been deceived by a hypocrite or cheated by a 
rogue describes hypocrites and rogues from a sharper 
insight, and with a keener scorn, than a man who 
knows them only from the observation of their vic- 
tims. Truisms brighten into truths, and hearsays into 
certainties, under the touch of such an artist. As a 
man's powers are determined in their direction by his 
materials, — as what he has seen, known, and assim- 
ilated becomes a part of his intellect and individual- 
ity, — Thackeray obeyed the mere instinct of his 
genius in becoming the delineator of manners and 
the satirist of shams. The artificial — sometimes as 
complicated with the natural, sometimes as entirely 
overlaying it, sometimes as almost extinguishing it — 
was the field where his powers could obtain their 
appropriate exercise. They had indeed grown into 
powers by the nutriment derived from it, and took 
to their game as the duck takes to the water. From 
the worst consequences of this perilous mental direc- 
tion he was saved by his tenderness of heart, and 
his love and appreciation of simple, unpretending 
moral excellence. He never hardened into misan- 
thropy or soured into cynicism. Much of his repre- 
sentation of life is necessarily ungenial, for it is the 



206 



THACKERAY. 



representation of the selfish, the dissolute, the hard- 
hearted, and the worthless. Those who accuse him 
of cynicism for the manner in which he depicted 
these must expect a toleration after the fashion uf 
the Regent Duke of Orleans, " who thought," says 
Macaulay, " that he and his fellow-creatures were 
Yahoos," but then he thought "the Yahoo was a 
very agreeable sort of animal." Thackeray's stand- 
ard of human nature was not high, and his peculiar 
talent lay in delineating specimens of it lower than 
his own standard, but the wholesome impulses of his 
heart taught him when to use the lash and the 
scourge. The general impression his individuality 
leaves on the mind is not that of a cynic, but of a 
sceptic. He takes the world as he finds it; usually 
treats of it in a tone of good-natured banter ; is 
pleased when he can praise, and often grieved when 
he is compelled to censure ; touches lightly, but sure- 
ly, on follies, and only kindles into wrath at obdu- 
rate selfishness or malignity; hardly thinks the world 
can be bettered ; and dismisses it as something whose 
ultimate purpose it is impossible to explain. He re- 
cords that portion which passes under his own mi- 
croscopic vision, and leaves to others the task of 
reconciling the facts with accredited theories. 

In his earliest works the satirist is predominant 



THACKERAY. 207 



over the humorist. He adopted the almost universal 
policy of Englishmen who wish to attract public at- 
tention, — the policy of assault. Mr. Bull can only 
be roused into the admission of a writer's ability by 
feeling the smart of his whip on his hide. Sydney 
Smith, Macaulay, Carlyle, Kingsley, Ruskin, Thack- 
eray, having something to say to him, began with 
shrieking out that he was a fool and a rogue; and, 
thus gaining his ear, proceeded to state their rea- 
sons for so injurious an opinion, with a plentiful 
mixture all the time of opprobrious epithets to pre- 
vent a relapse into insensibility. This system natu- 
rally tends to make authors exaggerate things out 
of their relations in order to give immediate effect 
to their special view, and the habit of indiscriminate 
assault frequently survives the necessity for its exer- 
cise. Thackeray appears at first to have considered 
that his business was to find fault ; to carry into lit- 
erature the functions of the detective police ; to pry 
into the haunts, and arrest the persons, of scoundrels 
who evaded the ordinary operations of the law. The 
most fashionable clubs and drawing-rooms were in- 
vaded, to catch scamps whom a common policeman 
would have sought in low alleys and hells. The 
successful exposer found a saturnine enjoyment in the 
confusion and scandal which his ingenuity and per* 



208 



THACKERAY. 



tinacity wrought among " respectable " people, and his 
taste for the sport was naturally increased by its 
indulgence, and his success in its prosecution. He 
contracted a morbid liking for tainted character, and 
his sharp glance and fine scent were exercised to 
discover the taint in characters generally sound and 
healthy. The latent weaknesses, foibles, follies, vices, 
of the intelligent and good became the objects of his 
search, somewhat to the exclusion of their nobler 
and predominant qualities, and the result was, in 
many instances, wofully partial estimates and exhibi- 
tions of men and women. The truth was truth only 
from the satirist's point of view. 

But all these earlier works — " The Yellowplush 
Correspondence," 64 The Confessions of Fitz-Boodle," 
"The Luck of Barry Lyndon," "Men's Wives," 
" The Book of Snobs," not to mention others — have 
the one merit of being readable, — a merit which 
Thackeray never lost. The fascination they exert 
is in spite of the commonness of their materials. The 
charm comes from the writer, and his mode of treat- 
ment. The wit and the humor, so " bitter-sweet " ; 
the fine fancy and delicate observation ; the eye for 
ludicrous situations ; the richness, raciness, and occa- 
sional wildness of the comic vein ; the subtilty of 
the unexpected strokes of pathos ; the perfect obedi- 



THACKERAY. 



209 



ence of the style to the mind it expresses; and the 
continual presence of the writer himself, making him- 
self the companion of the reader, — gossiping, hinting, 
sneering, laughing, crying, as the narrative proceeds, 
— combine to produce an effect which nobody, to say 
. the least, ever found dull. The grace, flexibility, and 
easy elegance of the style are especially notable. It 
is utterly without pretension, and partakes of the 
absolute sincerity of the writer; it is talk in print, 
seemingly as simple as the most familiar private chat, 
yet as delicate in its felicities as the most elaborate 
composition. 

In "Vanity Fair," the first novel which gave the 
author wide celebrity, we have all the qualities we 
have noticed cast into the frame of a story, — a story 
which has a more connected interest and a more 
elastic movement than its successors, though we can- 
not think that it equals some of them in general 
power of thought, observation, and characterization. 
The moral, if moral it have, is that the Amelias of 
the world, with all their simplicity and ignorance, 
will, in the long run, succeed better than the Becky 
Sharps, with all their evil knowledge and selfish 
acuteness. Amelia is evidently as much the favorite 
of the author's heart as Becky is of his brain, and 
he has expended nearly as much skill in the delinea* 

N 



210 



THACKERAY. 



tion of the one as of the other. The public, how- 
ever, was prepared for the first, but the second took 
it by surprise. It was the most original female char- 
acter of its kind that had appeared in contemporary 
fiction, and the raciness and never-faltering courage 
with which the character was developed, through all 
the phases of her career, seemed an insult to the 
sex. "Cynic!" cried the ladies. The truth, in this 
case, was the cause of offence. The Sharps wisely 
held their tongues, and left the denial of the possi- 
bility of such a woman to those who had happily 
never made her acquaintance. Thackeray had evi- 
dently seen her, and seen also the Marquis of Steyne. 
The latter represents a class of titled reprobates in 
England and on the Continent, whom other novelists 
have repeatedly attempted to domesticate in the do- 
main of romance, but have failed from ignorance or 
exaggeration. The peculiarity of the Marquis is that 
a long life of habitual and various vice has spread a 
thick scurf over his soul, so that he has lost by de- 
grees all consciousness of the existence of such an 
organ. Few felons have gone to the gallows or the 
gibbet with such an oblivion of the immortal part of 
them as this noble Marquis exhibits in going to his 
daily dissoluteness and depravity. The character is 
in some respects a horrible one, but it is probably 



THACKERAY. 



211 



true. Shakespeare makes Emilia wish that the " per- 
nicious soul " of Iago " may rot half a grain a day " ; 
and it would certainly seem that the soul may, by 
a course of systematic and cynical depravity, be com- 
pletely covered up, if it may not be gradually con- 
sumed. 

" The History of Pendennis " has more variety 
of character, and more minute analysis of feeling, 
than 44 Vanity Fair," but the story drifts and drags. 
Though Mrs. Pendennis and Laura rank high among 
Thackeray's good women, his genius is specially seen 
in Blanche Araory, a most perfect and masterly ex- 
hibition of the union of selfishness and malice with 
sentimentality, resulting, as it seems to us, in a char- 
acter more wicked and heartless than that of Becky 
Sharp. MMjor Pendennis and she carry off the 
honors of the book, — a book which, with all its 
wealth of wit, humor, and worldly knowledge, still 
leaves the saddest impression on the mind of all of 
Thackeray's works. It is enjoyed while we are en- 
gaged in reading its many-peopled pages ; the sepa- 
rate scenes and incidents are full of matter ; but it 
wants unity and purpose, and the wide information 
of the superficies of life it conveys is of the kind 
which depresses rather than exhilarates. The gloss is 
altogether taken both from literature and society, and 



212 



THACKEKAY. 



the subtile scepticism of the author's view of life is 
destructive of those illusions which are beneficent, as 
well as of those delusions which are mischievous. 
There are certain habits, prejudices, opinions, and pre- 
conceptions, which, though they cannot stand the test 
of relentless criticism, are still bound up with virtues, 
and are at some periods of life the conditions both 
of action and good action. They should be unlearned 
by experience, if unlearned at all. To begin life 
with a theoretical disbelief in them, is to anticipate 
experience at the cost often of destroying ambition 
and weakening will. Thackeray in this novel gives 
a great deal of that sort of information which is not 
practically so good as the ignorance of enthusiasm and 
the error of faith. We assent as we read, and con- 
gratulate ourselves on being so much more knowing 
than our neighbors ; but at the end we find that, 
while our eyes have been opened, the very sources 
of volition have been touched with paralysis. 

" The History of Henry Esmond " is an attempt 
to look at the age of Queen Anne through the eyes 
of a contemporary, and to record the result of the 
inspection in the style of the period. It is, on the 
whole, successful. The diction of the book is exqui- 
site; pleasant glimpses are given of the memorable 
men of the era, — literary, political, and military ; 



THACKERAY. 



213 



and the languid pace with which the story rambles 
to its conclusion provokes just that tranquil interest 
with which Esmond himself recalls in memory the 
incidents of his career. Both persons and scenes 
have the visionary grace and remoteness which ob- 
jects take when seen through the thin and shining 
mist of imaginative recollection. Beatrix Esmond, 
the heroine, is another of Thackeray's studies in 
perverted feminine character, and is worthy of the 
delineator of Becky and Blanche. The picture of 
the old age of this pernicious beauty, given in "The 
Virginians," is equally skilful and true. The defect 
in the plot of " Henry Esmond " is obvious to every 
reader. Lady Castlewood, whom the author intends to 
represent as the ideal of a noble woman, loves the 
lover of her daughter and is swayed by passions 
and placed in situations degrading to womanhood ; 
while Esmond himself, put forward as a high-toned 
gentleman and chivalrous man of honor, is so demor- 
alized by his passion for a jilt, that he enters into a 
conspiracy to overturn the government, and involve 
England in civil war, simply to please her, and with 
a profound disbelief in the cause for which he is to 
draw his sword. The atrocious villany of such con- 
duct, from which a Marquis of Steyne would have 
recoiled, appears to Thackeray simply the weakness 
of a noble nature. 



214 



THACKERAY. 



"The Newcomes" is perhaps the most genial of 
the author's works, and the one which best exhibits 
the maturity and the range of his powers. It seems 
written with a pen diamond-pointed, so glittering and 
incisive is its slightest touch. The leading idea is 
the necessary unhappiness of marriage without mu- 
tual love, no matter what other motive, selfish or 
generous, may prompt it; and the worldly view of 
the matter, as contrasted with the romantic, has 
never been combated with more unanswerable force 
than by this realist and man of the world. The 
practical argument loses none of its power by be- 
ing given in instances, instead of declamations or 
syllogisms. The sincerity and conscientiousness of 
Thackeray's mind, and the absence in him of any 
pretension to emotions he does not feel and ideas he 
does not believe, are very marked in this book. He 
has the honesty of a clear-sighted and clear-headed 
witness on the stand, stating facts as they appear to 
him, and on the watch to escape being perjured by 
yielding to the impulses either of amiability or mal- 
ice. In the versatile characterization of the work, 
two inimitable personages stand out as the best ex- 
pression of Thackeray's heart, — Colonel Newcome 
and Madame de Florae. Ethel Newcome seems to 
us, on the whole, an ambitious failure, lacking the 



THACKERAY. 



215 



usual vitality of the authors feminine characters, and 
wrought out with set purpose against his grain to 
show that he could conceive and delineate 44 a young 
lady." It is hard for the reader to share Give's 
passion for her, for she never arrives in the book to 
substantial personality. She brings to mind Adam, 
in the German play, who is represented as passing 
across the stage, 44 going to be created." Rosey Mac- 
kenzie has infinitely more life. Lady Kew is a good 
female counterpart of the Marquis of Steyne ; Ma- 
dame d'lvry is Blanche Amory grown up ; Mrs. Mac- 
kenzie is petty malice and selfishness personified ; 
and all three are masterpieces in their several kinds. 
Indeed, the ingenious contrivances of human beings 
to torment each other were never better set forth 
than in these 44 Memoirs of a Respectable Family." 

We have no space to do even partial justice to 
" The Virginians," " Lovel the Widower," and 44 The 
Adventures of Philip." Attractive as these are, they 
furnish no specially novel illustrations of Thackeray's 
powers, and exhibit no change in the point of view 
from which he surveyed life. Perhaps as he grew 
older there was a more obvious desire on his part to 
appear amiable. He celebrates the kindly virtues. 
He protests against being called a cynic ; condescends 
to interrupt the course of his story to answer petu- 



216 THACKERAY. 

lant criticisms petulantly ; and relaxes somewhat from 
his manly and resolute tone. The struggle between 
his feelings and his obstinate intellectual habit of 
minutely inspecting defects is obvious on his page. 
He likes good people, yet cannot help indulging in 
a sly, mischievous cut at their faults, and then seems 
vexed that he yields to the temptation. His humility 
is often that of a person who tells his neighbor that 
he is a fool and then adds, " but so are we all, more 
or less " ; the particular fool pointed out having a dim 
intuition that the rapid generalization at the end is 
intended rather to indicate the wisdom of the gener- 
alizer than his participation in the universal folly. 
A covert insult thus lurks under his ostentatious 
display of charity. And then in his jets of geniality 
there is something suspicious. He condescends ; he 
slaps ^n the back ; he patronizes in praising ; he is 
benevolent from pity ; and, with a light fleer or van- 
ishing touch of sp.r^-isr^, he hints that it is a superior 
intelligence that r. thus disporting in the levities of 
good-fellowship. 

One thing remains to be said regarding the collec- 
tive impression left on the mind by Thackeray's works. 
That impression, sharply sor'.ti.iizFd, we will venture 
to say is this, that life as h'j :ep T ip.er.i-s it is life not 
worth the living. It is doubts v&j '/ tertaining to 



THACKERAY. 



217 



read about, and it is not without instruction ; but 
who would wish to go through the labor and vexa- 
tion of leading it ? Who would desire to be any one 
of the characters, good or bad, depicted in it? Who 
would consider its pleasures and rewards as any com- 
pensation for its struggles, disappointments, and dis- 
illusions ? Who, if called upon to accept existence 
under its conditions, would not, on the whole, con- 
sider existence a bore or a buiden, rather than a 
blessing? This can, we think, be said of no other 
delineator of human life and human character of equal 
eminence ; and it points to that pervading scepticism, 
in Thackeray's mind, which is felt to be infused into 
the inmost substance of his works. Deficient in those 
qualities and beliefs which convey inspiration as well 
as information, which impart heat to the will as well 
as light to the intellect, — lacking the insight of- 
principles and the experience of great passions and 
uplifting sentiments, — his representation even of the 
actual world excludes the grand forces which really 
animate and move it, and thus ignores those deeper 
elements which give to life earnestness, purpose, and 
glow. 



10 



vni. 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.* 

THE romance of "The Marble Faun" will be 
widely welcomed, not only for its intrinsic mer- 
its, but because it is a sign that its writer, after a 
silence of seven or eight years, has determined to 
resume his place in the ranks of authorship. In his 
Preface he tells us, that in each of his previous publi- 
cations he had unconsciously one person in his eye, 
whom he styles his " gentle reader." He meant it 
"for that one congenial friend, more comprehensive 
of his purposes, more appreciative of his success, 
more indulgent of his shortcomings, and, in all re- 
spects, closer and kinder than a brother, — that all- 
sympathizing critic, in short, whom an author never 
actually meets, but to whom he implicitly makes his 
appeal, whenever he is conscious of having done his 
best." He believes that this reader did once exist 
for him, and duly received the scrolls he flung " upon 

* The Marble Faun ; or the Romance of Monte Beni. By Na- 
thaniel Hawthorne. Boston, 1860. 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



219 



whatever wind was blowing, in the faith that they 
would find him out." "But," he questions, " is he 
extant now? In these many years since he last 
heard from me, may he not have deemed his earthly 
task accomplished, and have withdrawn to the para- 
dise of gentle readers, wherever it may be, to the 
enjoyments of wdiich his kindly charity on my behalf 
must surely have entitled him ? " As, however, Haw- 
thorne's reputation has been steadily growing with 
the lapse of time, he has no cause to fear that the 
longevity of his gentle reader will not equal his 
own. 

The publication of this new romance seems to offer 
us a fitting occasion to attempt some description of 
the peculiarities of the genius of which it is the lat- 
est offspring, and to hazard some judgments on its 
predecessors. It is more than twenty-five years since 
Hawthorne began that remarkable series of stories 
and essays which are now collected in the volumes 
of "Twice -Told Tales," "The Snow Image and other 
Tales," and " Mosses from an Old Manse." From the 
first he was recognized, by such readers as he chanced 
to find, as a man of genius;- yet for a long time he 
enjoyed, in his own words, the distinction of being 
" the obscurest man of letters in America." His 
readers were " gentle " rather than enthusiastic ; their 



220 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



fine delight in^liis creations was an individual per- 
ception of subtile excellences of thought and style, 
too refined and self-satisfying to be contagious ; and 
the public was untouched, whilst the " gentle " reader 
was full of placid enjoyment. Indeed, we fear that 
this kind of reader is something of an Epicurean, 
welcoming a new genius as a private blessing, sent 
by a benign Providence to quicken a new life in his 
somewhat jaded sense of intellectual pleasure ; and 
that, after having received a fresh sensation, he is 
apt to be serenely indifferent whether the creator of 
it starve bodily or pine mentally from the lack of a 
cordial human shout of recognition. 

There would appear, on a' slight view of the matter, 
to be no reason for the little notice which Hawthorne's 
early productions received. The subjects were mostly 
drawn from the traditions and written records of 
New England, and gave the h beautiful strangeness " 
of imagination to objects, incidents, and characters 
which were familiar facts in the popular mind. The 
style, while it had a purity, sweetness, and grace 
which satisfied the most fastidious and exacting 
taste, had, at the same 1 time, more than the simpli- 
city and clearness of an ordinary school-book. But, 
though the subjects and the style were thus popular, 
there was something in the shaping and informing 



NATHANIEL HAWTHOKNE. 



221 



spirit which failed to awaken interest, or awak- 
ened interest without exciting delight. Misanthro- 
py, when it has its source in passion, — when it is 
fierce, bitter, fiery, and scornful, — when it vigorous- 
ly echoes the aggressive discontent of the world, and 
furiously tramples on the institutions and the men, 
luckily rather than rightfully, in the ascendant, — this 
is always popular ; but a misanthropy which springs 
from insight, — a misanthropy which is lounging, 
languid, sad, and depressing, — a misanthropy which 
remorselessly looks through cursing misanthropes and 
chirping men of the world with the same sure, de- 
tecting glance of reason, — a misanthropy which has 
no fanaticism, and which casts the same ominous doubt 
on subjectively morbid as on subjectively moral action, 
— a misanthropy which has no respect for impulses, 
but has a terrible perception of spiritual laws, — this 
is a misanthropy which can expect no wide recog- 
nition ; and it would be vain to deny that traces ot 
this kind of misanthropy are to be found in Haw- 
thorne's earlier, and are not altogether absent from 
his later works. He had spiritual insight, but it did 
not penetrate to the sources of spiritual joy ; and his 
deepest glimpses of truth were calculated rather to 
sadden than to inspire. A blandly sceptical distrust 
of human nature was the result of his most piercing 



222 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



glances into the human soul. He had humor, and 
sometimes humor of a delicious kind ; but this sun- 
shine of the soul was but sunshine breaking through, 
or lighting up, a sombre and ominous cloud. There 
was alsp observable in his earlier stories a lack of 
vigor, as if the power of his will had been impaired 
by the very process which gave depth and excursive- 
ness to his mental vision. Throughout, the impres- 
sion is conveyed of a shy recluse, alternately bashful 
in disposition and bold in thought, gifted with origi- 
nal and various capacities, but capacities which seemed 
to have been developed in the shade. Shakespeare 
calls moonlight the sunlight sick; and it is in some 
such moonlight of the mind that the genius of Haw- 
thorne found its first expression. A mild melan- 
choly, sometimes deepening into gloom, sometimes 

brightening into a " humorous sadness," characterized 
© © 7 

his early creations. Like his own Hepzibah Pyn- 
cheon, he appeared " to be walking in a dream " ; or 
rather, the life and reality assumed by his emotions 
" made all outward occurrences unsubstantial, like 
the teasing phantasms of an unconscious slumber." 
Though dealing largely in description, and with the 
most accurate perceptions of outward objects, he still, 
to use again his own words, gives the impression 
q{ a man " chiefly accustomed to look inward, and 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



223 



to whom external matters are of little value 01 im- 
port, unless they bear relation to something within 
his own mind." But that " something within his own 
mind" was often an unpleasant something, — perhaps 
a ghastly occult perception of deformity and sin in 
what appeared outwardly fair and good; so that the 
reader felt a secret dissatisfaction with the disposition 
which directed the genius, even in the homage he 
awarded to the genius itself. As psychological por- 
traits of morbid natures, his delineations of character 
might have given a purely intellectual satisfaction ; 
but there was audible, to the delicate ear, a faint and 
muffled growl of personal discontent, which showed 
they were not mere exercises of penetrating imagi- 
native analysis, but had in them the morbid vitality 
of a despondent mood. 

Yet, after admitting these peculiarities, nobody who 
is now drawn to the " Twice -Told Tales," from his 
interest in the later romances of Hawthorne, can fail 
to wonder a little at the limited number of readers 
they attracted on their original publication ; for many 
of these stories are at once a representation of early 
New England life and a criticism of it. They have 
much in them of the deepest truth of history. " The 
Legends of the Province House," "The Gray Cham- 
pion," "The Gentle Boy," "The Minister's Black 



224 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



Veil," " Endicott and the Eed Cross," not to men- 
tion others, contain important matter which cannot 
be found in Bancroft or even Winthrop. They ex- 
hibit the inward struggles of New England men and 
women with some of the darkest problems of exist- 
ence, and have more vital import to thoughtful 
minds than the records of Indian or Revolutionary 
warfare. In the " Prophetic Pictures," " Fancy's 
Show-Box," "The Great Carbuncle," "The Haunted 
Mind," and " Edward Fane's Rose-Bud," there are 
flashes of moral insight, which light up, for the mo- 
ment, the darkest recesses of the individual mind ; 
and few sermons reach to the (Jepth of thought and 
sentiment from which these seemingly airy sketches 
draw their sombre life. It is common, for instance, 
for religious moralists to insist on the great spiritual 
truth, that wicked thoughts and impulses, which cir- 
cumstances prevent from passing into wicked acts, 
are still deeds in the sight of God ; but the living 
truth subsides into a dead truism, as enforced by 
commonplace preachers. In " Fancy's Show-Box," 
Hawthorne seizes the prolific idea ; and the respecta- 
ble merchant and respected church-member, in the 
still hour of his own meditations, convicts himself of 
being a liar, cheat, thief, seducer, and murderer, as 
he casts his glance over the mental events which form 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



225 



his spiritual biography. Interspersed with serious 
histories and moralities like these are others which 
embody the sweet and playful, though still thought- 
ful and slightly saturnine action of Hawthorne's mind, 
— like "The Seven Vagabonds," "Snow-Flakes," 
"The Lily's Quest," "Mr. Higgenbotham's Catastro- 
phe," " Little Annie's Ramble," " Sights from a 
Steeple," "Sunday at Home," and "A Rill from the 
Town-Pump." 

The " Mosses from an Old Manse " are intellectu- 
ally and artistically much superior to the " Twice- 
Told Tales." The twenty- three stories and essays 
which make up the volumes are almost perfect of 
their kind. Each is complete in itself, and many 
might be expanded into long romances by the simple 
method of developing the possibilities of their shad- 
owy types of character into appropriate incidents. 
In description, narration, allegory, humor, reason, 
fancy, subtilty, inventiveness, they exceed the best 
productions of Addison ; but they want Addison's 
sensuous contentment, and sweet and kindly spirit. 
Though the author denies that he has exhibited his 
own individual attributes in these "Mosses," though 
he professes not to be "one of those supremely hos- 
pitable people who serve up their own hearts deli- 
cately fried, with brain-sauce, as a titbit for their 
10* o 



226 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

beloved public," — yet it is none the less apparent 
that he has diffused through each tale and sketch 
the life of the mental mood to which it owed its 
existence, and that one individuality pervades and 
colors the whole collection. The defect of the seri- 
ous stories is, that character is introduced, not as 
thinking, but as the illustration of thought. The 
persons are ghostly, with a sad lack of flesh and 
blood. They are phantasmal symbols of a medita- 
tive and imaginative analysis of human passions and 
aspirations. The dialogue, especially, is bookish, 
as though the personages knew their speech was to 
be printed, and were careful of the collocation and 
cadence of their words. The author throughout is 
evidently more interested in his large, wide, deep, 
indolently serene, and lazily sure and critical view 
of the conflict of ideas and passions, than he is with 
the individuals who embody them. He shows moral 
insight without moral earnestness. He cannot con- 
tract his mind to the patient delineation of a moral 
individual, but attempts to use individuals in order 
to express the last results of patient moral percep 
tion. Young Goodman Brown and Roger Malvin 
are not persons ; they are the mere loose, personal 
expression of subtile thinking. " The Celestial Rail- 
road," " The Procession of Life," " Earth's Holocaust," 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



227 



" The IJosom Serpent," indicate thought of a charac- 
ter equally deep, delicate, and comprehensive ; but 
the characters are ghosts of men rather than sub- 
stantial individualities. In the " Mosses from an Old 
Manse," we are really studying the phenomena of 
human nature, while, for the time, we beguile our- 
selves into the belief that we are following the for- 
tunes of individual natures. 

Up to this time, the writings of Hawthorne con- 
veyed the impression of a genius in which insight 
so dominated over impulse that it was rather men- 
tally and morally curious than mentally, and morally 
impassioned. The quality evidently wanting to its 
full expression was intensity. In the romance of 
"The Scarlet Letter" he first made his genius effi- 
cient by penetrating it with passion. This book 
forced itself into attention by its inherent power ; 
and the author's name, previously known only to- a 
limited circle of readers, suddenly became a familiar 
word in the mouths of the great reading public of 
America and England. It may be said that it " cap- 
tivated " nobody, but took everybody captive. Its 
power could neither be denied nor resisted. There 
were growls of disapprobation from novel-readers, that 
Hester Prynne and the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale were 
subjected to cruel punishments unknown to the juris* 



228 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



prudence of fiction, — that the author was an inquis- 
itor who put his victims on the rack, — and that 
neither amusement nor delight resulted from seeing 
the contortions and hearing the groans of these mar- 
tyrs of sin ; but the fact was no less plain that Haw- 
thorne had for once compelled the most superficial 
lovers of romance to submit themselves to the magic 
of his genius. The readers of Dickens voted him, 
with three times three* to the presidency of their 
republic of letters ; the readers of Hawthorne were 
caught by a coup d'etat, and fretfully submitted to a 
despot whom they could not depose. 

The success of " The Scarlet Letter " is an exam- 
ple of the advantage which an author gains by the 
simple concentration of his powers on one absorbing 
subject. In the "Twice -Told Tales" and the "Moss- 
es from an Old Manse " Hawthorne had exhibited a 
wider range of sight and insight than in " The Scar- 
let Letter." Indeed, in the little sketch of 44 Endi- 
cott and the Red Cross," written twenty years before, 
he had included in a few sentences the whole matter 
which he afterwards treated in his famous story. In 
describing the various inhabitants of an early New 
England town, as far as they were representative, 
he touched incidentally on a u young woman, with 
no mean share of beauty, whose dooin it was to 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



229 



wear the letter A on the breast of her gown, in the 
eyes of all the world and her own children. And 
even her own children knew what that initial signi- 
fied. Sporting with her infamy, the lost and desper- 
ate creature had embroidered the fatal token in scarlet 
cloth, with golden thread and the nicest art of needle- 
work ; so that the capital A might have been thought 
to mean Admirable, or anything, rather than Adul- 
teress." Here is the germ of the whole pathos and 
terror of 14 The Scarlet Letter " ; but it is hardly 
noted in the throng of symbols, equally pertinent, in 
the few pages of the little sketch from which we 
have quoted. 

Two characteristics of Hawthorne's genius stand 
plainly out in the conduct and characterization of the 
romance of " The Scarlet Letter," which were less 
obviously prominent in his previous works. The 
first relates to his subordination of external incidents 
to inward events. Mr. James's " solitary horseman " 
does more in one chapter than Hawthorne's hero in 
twenty chapters ; but then James deals with the 
arms of men, while Hawthorne deals with their souls. 
Hawthorne relies almost entirely for the interest of 
his story on what is felt and done within the minds 
of his characters. Even his most picturesque descrip- 
tions and narratives are only one tenth matter to 



230 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



nine tenths spirit. The results that follow from one 

external act of folly or crime are to him enough for 

an Iliad of woes. It might be supposed that his 

whole theory of Romantic Art was based on these 

tremendous lines of Wordsworth : — 

" Action is momentary, — 
The motion of a muscle, this way or that : 
Suffering is long, obscure, and infinite." 

The second characteristic of his genius is con- 
nected with the first. With his insight of individual 
souls he combines a far deeper insight of the spirit- 
ual laws which govern the strangest aberrations of 
individual souls. But it seems to us that his mental 
eye, keen-sighted and far-sighted as it is, overlooks 
the merciful modifications of the austere code whose 
pitiless action it so clearly discerns. In his long and 
patient brooding over the spiritual phenomena of 
Puritan life, it is apparent, to the least critical ob- 
server, that he has imbibed a deep personal antip- 
athy to the Puritanic ideal of character ; but it is no 
less apparent that his intellect and imagination have 
been strangely fascinated by the Puritanic idea of jus- 
tice. His brain has been subtly infected by the Puri- 
tanic perception of Law, without being warmed by 
the Puritanic faith in Grace. Individually, he would 
much prefer to have been one of his own " Seven 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



231 



Vagabonds" rather than one of the austerest preach- 
ers of the primitive church of New England ; but the 
austerest preacher of the primitive church of New Eng- 
land would have been more tender and considerate 
to a real Mr. Dimmesdale and a real Hester Prynne 
than this modern romancer has been to their typical 
representatives in the world of imagination. Through- 
out " The Scarlet Letter " we seem to be following 
the guidance of an author who is personally good- 
natured, hut intellectually and morally relentless. 

" The House of the Seven Gables," Hawthorne's 
next work, while it has less concentration of passion 
and tension of mind than " The Scarlet Letter," in- 
cludes a wider range of observation, reflection, and 
character ; and the morality, dreadful as fate, which 
hung like a black cloud over the personages of the 
previous story, is exhibited in more relief. Although 
the book has no imaginative creation equal to ^little 
Pearl, it still contains numerous examples of char- 
acterization at once delicate and deep. Clifford, es- 
pecially, is a study in psychology, as well as a 
marvellously subtile delineation of enfeebled man- 
hood. The general idea of the story is this, — 
" that the w r rong-doing of one generation lives into 
the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every 
temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrol- 



232 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



lable mischief" ; and the mode in which this idea is 
carried out shows great force, fertility, and refine- 
ment of mind. A weird fancy, sporting with the 
facts detected by a keen observation, gives to every 
gable of the Seven Gables, every room in the House, 
every burdock growing rankly before the door, a sym- 
bolic significance. The queer mansion is haunted, — 
haunted with thoughts which every moment are lia- 
ble to take ghostly shape. All the Pyncheons whc 
have resided in it appear to have infected the very 
timbers and walls with the spiritual essence of their 
lives, and each seems ready to pass from a" memory 
into a presence. The stern theory of the author 
regarding the hereditary transmission of family qual- 
ities, and the visiting of the sins of the fathers on 
the heads of their children, almost wins our reluc- 
tant assent through the pertinacity with which the 
generations of the Pyncheon race are made not 
merely to live in the blood and brain of their de- 
scendants, but to cling to their old abiding-place on 
earth, so that to inhabit the house is to breathe 
the Pyncheon soul and assimilate the Pyncheon in- 
dividuality. The whole representation, masterly as 
it is, 'considered as an effort of intellectual and im- 
aginative power, would still be morally bleak, were it 
not for the sunshine and warmth radiated from the 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



233 



character of Phoebe. In this delightful creation, 
Hawthorne for once gives himself up to homely 
human nature, and has succeeded in delineating a 
New England girl, cheerful, blooming, practical, affec- 
tionate, efficient, full of innocence and happiness, 
with all the " handiness " and native sagacity of her 
class, and so true and close to nature that the 
process by which she is slightly idealized is com- 
pletely hidden. 

In this romance there is also more humor than in 
any of his other works. It peeps out, even in the 
most serious passages, in a kind of demure rebellion 
against the fanaticism of his remorseless intelligence. 
In the description of the Pyncheon poultry, which 
we think unexcelled by anything in Dickens for 
quaintly fanciful humor, the author seems to indulge 
in a sort of parody of his own doctrine of the he- 
reditary transmission of family qualities. At any 
rate, that strutting chanticleer, with his two meagre 
wives and one wizened chicken, is a sly side fleer 
at the tragic aspect of the law of descent. Miss 
Hepzibah Pyncheon, her shop, and her customers, 
are so delightful, that the reader would willingly 
spare a good deal of Clifford and Judge Pyncheon 
and Holgrave, for more details of them and Phcebe. 
Uncle Venner, also, the old wood-sawyer, who boasts 



234 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



"that he has seen a good deal of the world, not only 
in people's kitchens and back-yards, but at the street- 
corners, and on the wharves, and in other places 
where his business " called him, and who, on the 
strength of this comprehensive experience, feels qual- 
ified to give the final decision in every case which 
tasks the resources of human wisdom, is a very 
much more humane and interesting gentleman than 
the Judge. Indeed, one cannot but regret that Haw- 
thorne should be so economical of his undoubted 
stores of humor, and that, in the two romances he 
has since written, humor, in the form of character, 
does not appear at all. 

Before proceeding to the consideration of " The 
Blithedale Romance," it is necessary to say a few 
words on the seeming separation of Hawthorne's ge- 
nius from his will. He has none of that ability 
which enabled Scott and enables Dickens to force 
their powers into action, and to make what was 
begun in drudgery soon assume the character of 
inspiration. Hawthorne cannot thus use his genius ; 
his genius always uses him. This is so true, that 
he often succeeds better in what calls forth his per- 
sonal antipathies than in what calls forth his per- 
sonal sympathies. His Life of General Pierce, for 
instance, is altogether destitute of life ; yet in writ- 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



235 



ing it he must have exerted himself to the utmost, 
as his object was to urge the claims of an old and 
dear friend to the Presidency of the Republic. . The 
style, of course, is excellent, as it is impossible for 
Hawthorne to write bad English ; but the genius of 
the man has deserted him. General Pierce, whom 
he loves, he draws so feebly, that one doubts, while 
reading the biography, if such a man exists; Hol- 
lingsworth, whom he hates, is so vividly character- 
ized, that the doubt is, while we read the romance, 
whether such a man can possibly be fictitious. 

Midway between such a work as the " Life of 
General Pierce " and " The Scarlet Letter " may be 
placed k4 The Wonder-Book" and "Tanglewood Tales." 
In these Hawthorne's genius distinctly appears, and 
appears in its most lovable, though not in its deepest 
form. These delicious stories, founded on the my- 
thology of Greece, were written for children, &ut 
they delight men and women as well. Hawthorne 
never pleases grown people so much as when he 
writes with an eye to the enjoyment of little people. 

Now u The Blithedale Romance" is far from be- 
ing so pleasing a performance as <% Tang:ewood Tales," 
yet it very much better illustrates tiie operation, in- 
dicates the quality, and expresses the power, of the 
author's genius. His great books appear not so 



236 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



much created by him as through him. They have 
the character of revelations, — he, the instrument, be- 
ing often troubled with the burden they impose on 
his mind. His profoundest glances into individual 
souls are like the marvels of clairvoyance. It would 
seem, that, in the production of such a work as 
" The Blithedale Romance," his mind had hit acci- 
dentally, as it were, on an idea or fact mysteriously 
related to some morbid sentiment in the inmost core 
of his nature, and to numerous scattered observations 
of human life, lying unrelated in his imagination. 
In a sort of meditative dream, his intellect drifts in 
the direction to which the subject points, broods pa- 
tiently over it, looks at it, looks into it, and at last 
looks through it to the law by which it is governed. 
Gradually, individual beings, definite in spiritual qual- 
ity, but shadowy in substantial form, group them- 
selves around this central conception, and by degrees 
assume an outward body and expression correspond- 
ing to their internal nature. On the depth and in- 
tensity of the mental mood, the force of the fascina- 
tion it exerts over him, and the length of time it 
holds him captive, depend the solidity and substance 
of the individual characterizations. In this way Miles 
Coverdale, Hollingsworth, Westervelt, Zenobia, and 
Priscilla become real persons to the mind which has 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



237 



called them into being. He knows every secret and 
watches, every motion of their souls, yet is, in a 
measure, independent of them, and pretends to no 
authority by which he can alter the destiny which 
consigns them to misery or happiness. They drift 
to their doom by the same law by which they drifted 
across the path of his vision. Individually, he abhors 
Hollingsworth, and would like to annihilate Wester- 
velt, yet he allows the superb Zenobia to be their 
victim ; and if his readers object that the effect of 
the whole representation is painful, he will doubtless 
agree with them, but sorrowfully confess his incapaci- 
ty honestly to alter a sentence. He professes to 
tell the story as it was revealed to him ; and the 
license in which a romancer might indulge is denied 
to a biographer of spirits. Show him a fallacy in 
his logic of passion and character, point out a false 
or defective step in his analysis, and he will gladly 
alter the whole to your satisfaction ; but four human 
souls, such as he has described, being given, their 
mutual attractions and repulsions will end, he feels 
assured, in just such a catastrophe as he has stated. 

Eight years have passed since "The Blithedale 
Romance " was written, and during nearly the whole 
of this period Hawthorne has resided abroad. " The 
Marble Faun," which must, on the whole, be con- 



238 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



sidered the greatest of his works, proves that his 
genius has widened and deepened in this interval 
without any alteration or modification of its charac 
teristic merits and characteristic defects. The most 
obvious excellence of the work is the vivid truthful 
ness of^ its descriptions of Italian life, manners, and 
scenery ; and, considered merely as a record of a 
tour in Italy, it is of great interest and attractive- 
ness. The opinions on Art, and the special criti- 
cisms on the masterpieces of architecture, sculpture, 
and painting, also possess a value of their own. The 
story might have been told, and the characters fully 
represented, in one third of the space devoted to 
them, yet description and narration are so artfully 
combined that each assists to give interest to the 
other. Hawthorne is one of those true observers 
who concentrate in observation every power of their 
minds. He has accurate sight and piercing insight. 
When he modifies either the form or the spirit of 
the objects he describes, he does it either by viewing 
them through the medium of an imagined mind or 
by obeying associations which they themselves sug- 
gest. We might quote from the descriptive portions 
of the work a hundred pages, at least, which would 
demonstrate how closely accurate observation is con- 
nected with the highest powers of the intellect and 
imagination. 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



239 



The style of the book is perfect of its kind, and, if 
Hawthorne had written nothing else, would entitle him 
to rank among the great masters of English composi- 
tion. Walter Savage Landor is reported to have said 
of an author whom he knew in his youth, " My friend 
wrote excellent English, a language now obsolete." 
Had " The Marble Faun " appeared before he uttered 
this sarcasm, the wit of the remark would have been 
pointless. Hawthorne not only writes English, but the 
sweetest, simplest, and clearest English that ever has 
been made the vehicle of equal depth, variety, and 
subtilty of thought and emotion. His mind is re- 
flected in his style, as a face is reflected in a mir- 
ror ; and the latter does not give back its image 
with less appearance of effort than the former. His 
excellence consists not so much in using common 
words as in making common words express uncom- 
mon things. Swift, Addison, Goldsmith, not to men- 
tion others, wrote with as much simplicity ; but the 
style of neither embodies an individuality so com- 
plex, passions so strange and intense, sentiments so 
fantastic and preternatural, thoughts so profound and 
delicate, and imaginations so remote from the recog- 
nized limits of the ideal, as find an orderly outlet in 
the pure English of Hawthorne. He has hardly a 
word to which Mrs. Trimmer would primly object, 



240 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



hardly a sentence which would call forth the frosty 
anathema of Blair, Hurd, Karnes, or TThately, and 
yet he contrives to embody in his simple style qual- 
ities which would almost excuse the verbal extrava- 
gances of Carlyle. 

In regard to the characterization and plot of u The 
Marble Faun," there is room for widely varying 
opinions. Hilda, Miriam, and Donatello will be 
generally received as superior in power and depth 
to any of Hawthorne's previous creations of charac- 
ter; Donatello, especially, must be considered one of 
the most original and exquisite conceptions in the 
whole range of romance ; but the story in which 
they appear will seem to many an unsolved puzzle, 
and even the tolerant and interpretative <k gentle 
reader" will be troubled with the unsatisfactory con- 
clusion. It is justifiable for a romancer to sting the 
curiosity of his readers with a mystery, only on the 
implied obligation to explain it at last ; but this story 
begins in mystery only to end in mist. The sugges- 
tive faculty is tormented rather than 'genially excited, 
and in the end is left a prey to doubts. The cen- 
tral idea of the story, the necessity of sin to convert 
such a creature as Donatello into a moral being, is 
not happily illustrated in the leading event. When 
Donatello kills the wretch who malignantly dogs the 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



241 



steps of Miriam, all readers think that Donatello 
committed no sin at all ; and the reason is, that 
Hawthorne has deprived the persecutor of Miriam 
of all human attributes, made him an allegorical rep- 
resentation of one of the most fiendish forms of un- 
mixed evil, so that we welcome his destruction with 
something of the same feeling with which, in follow- 
ing the allegory of Spenser or Bunyan, we rejoice 
in the hero's victory over the Blatant Beast or Gi- 
ant Despair. Conceding, however, that Donatello's 
act was murder, and not "justifiable homicide," we 
are still not sure that the author's conception of his 
nature and of the change caused in his nature by 
that act, are carried out with a felicity correspond- 
ing to the original conception. 

In the first volume, and in the early part of the 
second, the author's hold on his design is compara- 
tively firm, but. it somewhat relaxes as he proceeds, 
and in the end it seems almost to escape from his 
grasp. Few can be satisfied with the concluding 
chapters, for the reason that nothing is really con- 
cluded. We are willing to follow the ingenious pro- 
cesses of Calhoun's deductive logic, because we are 
sure, that, however severely they task the faculty 
of attention, they will lead to some positive result ; 
but Hawthorne's logic of events leaves i^s in the end 
11 p 



242 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



bewildered in a labyrinth of guesses. The book is, 
on the whole, such a great book, that its defects are 
felt with all the more force. 

In this rapid glance at some of the peculiarities 
of Hawthorne's genius, we have not, of course, been 
able to do full justice to the special merits of the 
works passed in review ; but we trust that we have 
said nothing which would convey the impression that 
we do not place them among the most remarkable 
romances produced in an age in which romance-writ- 
ing has called forth some of the highest powers of 
the human mind. In intellect and imagination, in 
the faculty of discerning spirits and detecting laws, 
we doubt if any living novelist is his equal ; but his 
genius, in its creative action, has been heretofore 
attracted to the dark rather than the bright side of 
the interior life of humanity, and the geniality which 
evidently is in him has rarely found adequate ex- 
pression. In the many works which he may still be 
expected to write, it is to be hoped that his mind 
will lose some of its sadness of tone without losing 
any of its subtilty and depth ; but, in any event, it 
would be unjust to deny that he has already done 
enough to insure him a commanding position in 
American literature as long as American literature 
has an existence. 



IX. 



EDWARD EVE RETT.* 

IT is certainly fit, gentlemen, that the sense of 
bereavement which this city and the whole na- 
tion have felt in the death of Mr. Everett should 
find emphatic expression in the Club of which he 
was the honored President. Known to every mem- 
ber as the most exquisitely affable of presiding offi- 
cers ; a chairman with the gracious and graceful 
manners of a host ; ever ready to listen as to speak ; 
and masking the eminence, which all were glad to 
acknowledge, in that bland and benignant courtesy, 
of which all were made to feel the charm, — his 
presence gave a peculiar dignity to our meetings, 
which it will be impossible to replace, and impressed 
on all of us the conviction, that to his other gifts 
and accomplishments must be added the distinction 
of having been the most accomplished gentleman of 
his time. Indeed, it is probable, that, in this quality 

* Read before the Thursday Evening Club, at its meeting on 
January 26, 1865. 



244 



EDWARD EVERETT. 



of high-bred and inbred courtesy, which we all have 
such good cause to admire and to remember, may be 
found the explanation and justification of some things 
in his character and career which have been sub 
jected to adverse and acrimonious criticism ; and, in 
the few remarks I propose to make, allow me to 
throw into relations to this felicity of his nature, 
the powers and achievements which have made him 
so widely famous, and, what is better, so widely 
mourned. 

Mr. Everett was born with that fineness of men 
tal and of bodily organization, the sensitiveness of 
which is hardly yet thoroughly tolerated by the 
world which still profits by its superiorities. There 
was refinement in the very substance of his being; 
by a necessity of his constitution he disposed every- 
thing he perceived into some orderly relations to 
ideas of dignity and grace; he instinctively shunned 
what was coarse, discordant, uncomely, unbecoming ; 
and that internal world of thoughts, sentiments, and 
dispositions, which each man forms or re-forms for 
himself, and in which he really lives, in his case 
obeyed the law of comeliness, and came out as 
naturally in his manners as in his writings, in the 
beautiful urbanity of his behavior, as in the cadenced 
periods of his eloquence. The fascination of this 



EDWARD EVERETT. 



245 



must have been felt even in his childhood, for he 
was an orator whose infant prattle attracted an au< 
dience ; and he may be said to have passed from the 
cradle into public life. To a swiftness and accuracy 
of apprehension which made study the most delight- 
ful and self-re warding of tasks, he added a general 
brightness, vigor and poise of faculties, which gave 
premature promise of the reflection and judgment 
which were to come. By some sure instinct, the 
friends who seemed combined in a kindly conspiracy 
to assist and to spoil him, must have felt that they 
had to do with a nature whose innate modesty was 
its protection from conceit, and whose ambition to 
excel was but one form of its ambition for excel- 
lence. The fact to be considered is, that, in child- 
hood and in youth as in manhood and age, there was 
something in him which irresistibly attracted admi- 
ration and esteem, and made men desirous of help- 
ing him on in the path his genius chose, and to the 
goal from which his destiny beckoned. 

It will be impossible here to do more than indi- 
cate the steps of that comprehensive career, so full 
of distinction for himself, so full of benefit for the 
nation, which has been for the past ten days the 
theme of so many eulogies : — the college student, 
bearing away the highest honors of his class ; the 



246 



EDWARD EVERETT. 



boy-preacher, whose pulpit eloquence alternately kin- 
dled and melted men of maturest years ; the Greek 
Professor, whose knowledge of the finest and most 
flexible instrument of human thought extorted the 
admiration of the most accomplished of all the trans- 
lators of Plato ; the fertile Writer and wide-ranging 
Critic, whose familiarity with many languages only 
added to the energy and elegance with which he 
wielded the resources of his own ; the Representative 
of Middlesex, whose mastery of the minutest details 
of political business was not more evident than his 
ready grasp of the broader principles of political 
science ; the Governor of Massachusetts, whose wise 
and able administration gave a new impulse to the 
cause of education and to some of the most impor- 
tant of the arts of peace ; the Ambassador, who co- 
operated with his friend, the great Secretary, in 
converting the provocations to what would have 
been one of the most calamitous of all wars into the 
occasion for negotiating one of the most beneficent 
of all treaties ; the President of Harvard, bringing 
back to his Alma Mater the culture he had received 
from her increased an hundred-fold, and presenting 
to the students the noble example of a scholarship 
which was always teaching, and therefore always 
learning ; the Secretary of State, whose brief posses- 



EDWARD EVERETT. 



247 



sion of office was yet sufficient to show with what 
firmness of purpose he could uphold American honor, 
and with what prodigality of information he could 
expound American rights ; the Orator of all " occa- 
sions," scattering through many years, and from a 
hundred platforms, the rich stores of his varied 
knowledge, the ripe results of his large experience, 
and the animating inspirations of his fervid soul; 
the Patriot, who ever made his scholarship, states- 
manship, and eloquence serviceable and subsidiary to 
the interest and glory of his country, and who, when 
would-be parricides lifted their daggers to stab the 
august mother who had borne them, flung himself, 
with a grand superiority to party prejudices, and a 
brave disdain of consequences to himself, into the 
great current of impassioned purpose which surged 
up from the nation's heroic heart; the Christian phi- 
lanthropist, who, through a long life, had been ^the 
object of no insult or wrong which could rouse in 
him the fierce desire for vengeance, and whose last 
public effort was a magnanimous plea for that " re- 
taliation " which Christianity both allows and enjoins : 
— all these claims to honor, all this multiform and 
multiplied activity, have been the subjects of eagef 
and emulous panegyric ; and little has been over 
looked in the loving and grateful survey. 



248 



FWARD EVERETT. 



Such a career implies the most assiduous self-cul 
ture; but .it was a culture free from the fault of 
intellectual selfishness, for it was not centred in 
itself, but pursued with a view to the public service; 
and the thirst for acquisition was not stronger than 
the ardor for communication. Such a career also 
implies a constant state of preparation for public 
duties ; but only by those whose ambition is to get 
office, rather than to get qualified for office, will this 
peculiarity be sneeringly imputed to a love of dis- 
play. Still, the vast publicity which such a career 
rendered inevitable would have developed in him 
some of the malignant, or some of the frivolous, vices 
of public life, had it not been that a fine modesty 
tempered his constant sense of personal efficiency, — 
had it not been that a certain shyness at the core 
of his being made it impossible that his self-reliance 
should rush rudely out in any of the brazen forms 
of self-assertion. And this brings me back to that 
essential gentlemanliness of nature, which penetrated 
every faculty, and lent its tone to every expression, 
of our departed President. This gave him a most 
sensitive regard for the rights and feelings of others, 
and this made him instinctively expect the same 
regard for his own. He guarded with an almost 
jealous vigilance the reserves of his individuality, 



EDWARD EVERETT. 



249 



and resented all uncouth or unwarranted intrusion 
into these sanctuaries which his dignity shielded, 
with a feeling of grieved surprise. In his wide con- 
verse with men, even in the contentions of party, 
his mind ever moved in a certain ideal region of 
mutual courtesy and respect. It was to be antici 
pated ; that, in the rough game of politics, where 
blows are commonly given and received with equal 
carelessness, and where mutual charges of dishonesty 
are both expected and unheeded, such a nature as 
Mr. Everett's should sometimes suffer exquisite pain ; 
that his nerves should quiver in impatient disgust of 
such odious publicity ; that he should be tempted at 
times to feel that the inconsiderate assailers of his 
character — 

a Made it seem more sweet to be 
The little life of bank and brier, 
The bird that pipes his lone desire, 
And dies unheard within his tree, 

" Than he who warbles long and loud, 
And drops at Glory's temple-gates ; 
For whom the carrion-vulture waits 
To tear his heart before the crowd! " 

In this sensitiveness, refinement, and courtesy of 
nature, in this chivalrous respect for other minds 
and tenderness for other hearts, is to be found the 
11* 



250 EDWARD EVERETT. 

peculiarity of his oratory. He was the last great 
master of persuasive eloquence. The circumstances 
of the time have given to our public speaking an 
aggressive and denouncing character, and invective 
has contemptuously cast persuasion aside, and almost 
reduced it to the condition of one of the lost arts. 
This is undoubtedly a great evil, for invective com- 
monly dispenses with insight, is impotent to interpret 
what it assails, and fits the tongue of mediocrity as 
readily as that of genius. It is true that the might- 
iest exemplars of eloquence have been those who 
have wielded this most terrific weapon in the armory 
of the orator with the most overwhelming effect. 
Demosthenes, Chatham, Burke, Mirabeau, men of 
vivid minds, hot hearts, and audacious wills, have 
made themselves the terror of the assemblies they 
ruled, by their power of uttering those brief and 
dreadful invectives, which "appall the guilty and 
make bold the free," — which come like the light- 
ning, irradiating for ' an instant what in an instant 
they blast. Perhaps the noblest spectacle in the 
annals of eloquence is that in which the mute rage 
and despair of a hundred millions of Asiatics found, 
in the assembly responsible for their oppression, fiery 
utterance from the intrepid lips of Burke. But such 
men are rightly examples only to their peers ; a 



EDWARD EVERETT. 



251 



certain autocracy of nature is the animating prin- 
ciple of their genius ; and, when they are copied sim- 
ply by the tongue, they are likely to produce shrews 
rather than sages. Mr. Everett followed the bent 
of his character and the law of his mind when he 
aimed to enter into genial relations with his auditors, 
and to associate the reception of his views with a 
quickening of their better feelings, and an addition to 
their self-respect. Mount Vernon, the poor of East 
Tennessee, the poor of Savannah, attest that his 
greatest triumphs were those of persuasion. And in 
recalling the tones of that melodious voice, whose 
words were thus works, one is tempted to think 
that Force, in eloquence, is the mailed giant of the 
feudal age, who, assailing under a storm of missiles 
the fortress of his adversary, makes the tough gates 
shiver under the furiously rapid strokes of his battle- 
axe, and enters as a victor ; while Persuasion, " with 
his garland and singing robes about him," speaks 
the magical word which makes the gates fly open of 
their own accord, and enters as a guest. 

It is but just, gentlemen, that our lamented Presi- 
dent, the source of so many eulogies, should now be 
their theme ; that his joy in recognizing eminency 
in others should be met by a glad and universal 



252 



EDWARD EVERETT. 



recognition of it in himself. And, certainly, that 
spotless private and distinguished public life could 
have closed at no period when the heart of the 
whole loyal nation was more eager to admire the 
genius of the orator, and sound the praises of the pa- 
triot, and laud the virtues of the man, than on the 
day when his mortal frame, beautiful in life, and 
beautiful in death, was followed by that long pro- 
cession of bereaved citizens, through those mourning 
streets, to that consecrated grave! 



X. 



THOMAS STARR KING.* 

I CANNOT doubt that all of you, friends and 
parishioners of Thomas Starr King, have felt 
how difficult it is to speak in detail of the qualities 
of him, the mere mention of whose name so quickly 
brings up his presence in all its gracious and genial 
power, and his nature in all its exquisite harmony. 
He comes to us always as a person, and not as an 
assemblage of qualities ; and however precious may 
be the memory of particular traits of mind or disposi- 
tion, they refuse to be described in general terms, 
but are all felt to be excellent and lovable, because 
expressive of him. Others may attract us through 
the splendor of some special faculty, or the eminency 
of some special virtue, but in his case it is the whole 
individual we admire and love, and the faculty takes 
its peculiar character, the virtue acquires its subtile 
charm, because considered as an outgrowth of the 

* Address at the Memorial Service at Hollis Street Church, Be* 
ton, on Sunday evening, April 3, 1864. 



254 



THOMAS STARR KING. 



beautiful, beneficent, and bounteous nature in which 
it had its root. 

And here, I think, we touch the source of his in- 
fluence and the secret of his power, as friend, pastor, 
preacher, writer, patriot, and — let me add — states- 
man. He had the rare felicity, in everything he said 
and did, of communicating himself, — the most pre- 
cious thing he could bestow ; and he so bound others 
to him by this occupation of their hearts, that to love 
him was to love a second self. This communication 
was as unmistakable in his lightest talk with a 
chance companion, as in that strong hold on masses 
of men, and power of lifting them up to the height 
of his own thought and purpose, which, in the case 
of California, will give his name a position among 
the moral founders of states. Everybody he met he 
unconsciously enriched ; everywhere he went he in- 
stinctively organized. Meanness, envy, malice, big- 
otry, avarice, hatred, low views of public and private 
duty, all bad passions and paltry expediencies,'" slunk 
away abashed from every mind which felt the light 
and heat of that sun-like nature, stealing or stream- 
ing into it. Such evil spirits could not live in such 
a rebuking presence, whether it came 'in the form 
of wit, or tenderness, or argument, or admonition, or 
exhilarating appeal, or soul-animating eloquence. Ev- 



THOMAS STARR KING. 



255 



erybody was more generous from contact with that 
radiating beneficence ; everybody caught the contagion 
of that cheerful spirit of humanity ; everybody felt 
grateful to that genial exorcist, who drove the devils 
of selfishness and pride from the heart, and softly 
ensconced himself in their vacated seats. The won- 
der is, not that he raised so much for benevolent 
purposes, but that he did not make a complete sweep 
of all the pockets which opened so obediently to his 
winning appeal. Rights of property, however jeal- 
ously guarded against others, were felt to be imper- 
tinent towards him ; his presence outvalued everything 
in the room he gladdened with his beaming face ; 
people were pleasingly tormented with a desire to 
give him something; for giving was so emphatically 
the law of his own being, he was so joyously disin- 
terested himself, that, in his company, avarice itself 
saw the ridiculous incongruity of its greed, and, -with 
a grim smile, suffered its clutch on its cherished 
hoards to relax. 

And this thorough good nature had nothing of the 
weakness, nothing of the cant, nothing of the fear of 
giving offence, nothing of the self-consciousness, noth 
ing of the bending and begging air of professional 
benevolence, but was as erect arid resolute as it was 
wholesome and sweet. It seemed the effect of the 



256 



THOMAS STARR KING. 



native vigor as well as the native kindliness of his 
cordial and opulent soul. It never cloyed with its 
amiability. It did not insult the poor with conde- 
scension, or court the rich with servility, but took its 
place on an easy equality and fraternity with all, 
without the pretence of being the inferior of any. 
While he was too manly to ape humility, the mere 
idea of setting himself up as "a superior being" 
would have drawn from him one of those bursts of 
uncontrollable merriment, happy as childhood's and 
as innocent, which will linger in the ears of friends 
who often heard that glad music, until the grave 
closes over them as it has over him. 

The expression, of this nature through the intellect 
was as free from obstruction as through morals and 
manners. His mind, like his heart, was open on all 
sides. Clear, bright, eager, rapid, and joyous ; with 
observation, memory, reason, imagination, in full play ; 
with a glance quick to detect the ludicrous as well 
as the beautiful ; and with an analogical power, both 
in the region of fancy and understanding, of remark- 
able vivacity and brilliancy; his intellect early fast- 
ened on facts and on principles with the delight of 
impulse rather than the effort of attention and will. 
In swiftness and exactness of perception, both of 
ideas and of their relations, he was a marvel from 



THOMAS STARR KING. 



257 



his boyhood. Grasping with such ease, and assimi- 
lating with such readiness, the nutriment of thought, 
he made mind faster than others receive impressions. 
His faculties palpably grew day by day, increasing 
their force and enlarging their scope with every fresh 
and new perception of nature and books and men. 
He tasted continually the deep joy of constant men- 
tal activity. Who shall measure the happiness of 
that exhilarating sense of daily increase of knowl- 
edge and development of power? — the sweet sur- 
prise of swift-springing thoughts from never-failing 
fountains, — the glow and elation of soul as objects 
poured in from without, and ideas streamed out from 
within ! His mind, as independent as it was recep- 
tive, and as free from self-distrust as from presump- 
tion, never lost its balance as it sensitively quivered 
under the various knowledge that went thronging 
into it; for there was the judgment to dispose" as 
well as the passion to know, and the sacred hunger 
for new truth and beauty never degenerated into 
that ignoble gluttony which paralyzes the action of 
the mind it overfeeds. 

There is something glorious in the contemplation 
of a youth passed in such constant, such happy, such 
self-rewarding toil. He had a natural aptitude for 
large ideas and deep sentiments. His mind caught 

Q 



258 THOMAS STARR KING. 

at laws immersed in bewildering details, — darted to 
the salient points and delved to the central princi- 
ples of controverted questions, — and absorbed systems 
of philosophy as hilariously as others devour story- 
books. The dauntless boy grappled with such 
themes as Plato and Goethe, and wrote about them 
with a prematureness of scholarship, a delicacy of 
discernment, a sweet, innocent combination of confi- 
dence and diffidence, which were inexpressibly charm- 
ing. Throughout his career, in sermon and in 
lecture, this strong tendency to view everything 
in its principles was always prominent ; and as a 
popularizer of ideas removed from ordinary appre- 
hension, — secreted, indeed, from general view in 
the jargon of metaphysics, — he was, perhaps, with- 
out an equal in the country. 

It is hardly possible to say what this mind might 
not have grown to be, had not the drain on its en- 
ergies begun almost as early as the unfolding of its 
faculties, — had not the dissipation of power nearly 
kept pace with its accumulation. His time, talent, 
and sympathies were the property of all they de- 
lighted and benefited. The public seized on him at 
an early age, and did not loosen its grasp until 
within a few days of his death. His parish was not 
confined to this society, but covered the ever-enlarg- 



THOMAS STARR KING. 



259 



ing circle of his acquaintances and audiences. The 
demands, accordingly, on that fertile brain and boun- 
teous heart were constant and endless. We were 
always after him to write, to preach, to lecture, to 
converse ; we plotted lovingly against his leisure ; 
and as long as there was a bit of life in him, we 
claimed it with all the indiscriminate eagerness of 
exacting affection. As soon as a thought sprouted 
in his head, we insisted on having it ; and we were 
all in a friendly conspiracy to prevent his exercise 
of that patient, concentrated, uninterrupted thinking, 
which conducts to the heights of intellectual power. 

Perhaps his elastic mind might have stood this 
drain ; but the mind is braced by the emotional forces 
which underlie it ; and it was on these that his 
friends delighted to feed. His sympathetic nature 
attracted towards him the craving for sympathy in 
others ; and nothing draws more on the very sources 
of vitality, mental and moral, than this assumption 
of the sorrows, disappointments, heart-breaks, and mis- 
eries of others, this incessant giving out of the very 
capital and reserve fund of existence, to meet the 
demands for sympathy. I have sometimes seen him 
physically and morally fatigued and exhausted from 
this over-exertion of brain and heart, and have won- 
dered why, if each found it so hard to bear his own 



260 



THOMAS STARR KING. 



burdens in silence, we did not consider the cruelty 
of casting the burdens of all, in one mountainous 
load, upon him. 

When we remember this immense readiness to give, 
this admission of the claims of misfortune and trou- 
ble to take out patent rights on his time and sym- 
pathy, it is astonishing how much, intellectually, he 
achieved. This was owing not more to the fine qual- 
ity of his intellect than to its mode of action, for 
deep down in the very centre of his being was the 
element of beauty, and this unceasingly strove to 
mould all he thought and did into its own likeness. 
It was not only expressed in fancy and imagination, 
in the richness of his imagery and the cadence of his 
periods, and in that peculiar combination of softness 
and fire which lent to his eloquence its persuasive 
power, but it gave luminousness to his arrangement, 
method to his scholarship, consecutiveness to his ar- 
gumentation, symmetry to his moral life. It abridged 
as well as decorated his work. Things that went into 
his mind huddled and confused, hastened to fall into 
their right relations, and harmoniously adjust them- 
selves to some definite plan and purpose, as soon as 
they felt the disposing touch of that artistic intelli- 
gence, to which all disorder was unbecoming as well 
as unsystematic. This quality of beauty, an elernea* 



THOMAS STARE KING. 



261 



of his character as well as a shaping faculty of his 
mind, demanded symmetry in all things, — symmetry 
of form in things imaginative, symmetry of law in 
things intellectual, symmetry of life in things moral. 
The besetting sins of the head and the heart ap- 
peared to him uncomely as well as wrong, and he 
avoided them through an instinctive love of the good 
and the fair. As much of our intellectual and moral 
effort is spent in removing obstacles and overcoming 
temptations, and as from this weary work he was in 
a great measure spared, the time saved was so many 
years added to his life. 

But it must be added, that this pervading senti- 
ment of the beautiful did not make him one of those 
bigots of the ideal, whom the deformities of practical 
life keep in a morbid state of constant moral or men- 
tal irritation. From the fret of this fine fanaticism, 
which always weakens the character it seemingly 
adorns, he was preserved by his exquisite, 'his deli- 
cious sense of the ludicrous. The deformed, when 
his eye sparkled upon it, hastened to change into the 
grotesque ; it acquired, indeed, a quaint beauty of its 
own ; it irritated, not his nerves, but his risibilities ; 
it slid into his loving heart, — always open to things 
human, — and was there nursed and cherished on the 
sunniest mirth and laughter that humorous object 



262 



THOMAS STARR KING. 



ever fed upon. For the morally deformed his wholo 
being had an instinctive repugnance ; but when him- 
self the mark at which meanness or malice aimed, he 
always seemed to me rather amused than exasper- 
ated. The oddity of the meanness, the strange futility 
of the malice, affected him like a practical joke ; 
quick as lightning to detect the base thing, he still 
dismissed it laughingly from his mind, with hardly 
the appearance of having suffered wrong, and certain- 
ly without any desire or intention to retaliate. No 
wound could fester in that humane and healthy soul. 

The love of the beautiful, to which I have referred 
as so strong an element in his nature, was, as it re- 
gards natural scenery, most completely embodied in 
his eloquent book on the White Hills, — which will 
look the sadder to us now that the loving chronicler 
of their varying aspects of grandeur and grace, who 
has associated his own name with every valley and 
peak, will visit them no more ; but when his ser- 
mons and lectures are published, it will be seen how 
closely the beautiful in nature was linked in his 
mind with the beautiful in thought, in character, and 
in action. He loved his theological calling, and it 
was his ambition, to pay the debt which every able 
man is said to owe his profession, namely, to contrib- 
ute some work of permanent value to its literature. 



THOMAS STARR KING. 



263 



Had he lived, he would, I think, have written the 
most original, the most interpretative, and the most 
attractive of all books on the life, character, and 
epistles of the Apostle Paul. But it was ordered 
that his life should be chiefly spent in direct action 
on men through speech and personal influence ; and 
theology may well wait for the book, when human- 
ity had such pressing need for the man. 

I hardly know how to speak of his moral and 
spiritual qualities ; for, noble as they were, they were 
not detached from his mind, but pervaded it. Both 
as a thinker and as a reformer he was brave almost 
to audacity; but his courage was tempered by an ad- 
mirable discretion and sense of the becoming, and 
his quick self-recovery from a mistake or error was 
not one of the least of his gifts. He seemed to have 
no fear, not even the subtlest form which fear as- 
sumes in our day, — the fear of being thought afraid. 
No supercilious taunt, or imputation of timidity, could 
sting him into going further in liberal theology , and 
reforming politics than his own intelligence and con- 
science carried him. Malignity was a spiritual vice 
of which I have sometimes doubted if he had even 
the mental perception. - His charity and toleration 
were as wide as his knowledge of men. Controversy 
was a gymnastic in which he delighted to brace hi? 



264 



THOMAS STARR KING. 



faculties, but he could look at disputed questions 
from the point of view of his opponents, discrimi- 
nate between dogmas and the holders of them, and 
assail opinions without unwittingly defaming charac- 
ter. Speaking the truth in love," was a text which 
he seemed born to illustrate ; and if, as a theologian, 
he did not perceive the moral evil of the world in 
all its ghastliness, it was because its most hateful 
forms stole away when he appeared, and, addressing 
what was good in men, the good went gladly out 
to him in return. His piety, pure, deep, tender, se- 
rene, and warm, took hold of the positive principles 
of light and beneficence, not of the negative ones of 
darkness and depravity, and — himself a child of the 
light — he preached the religion of spiritual joy. 

The rarity of such a character, and the wide in- 
fluence it was calculated to exert in virtue of its 
native qualities, were only seen in all their beauty 
and might when he went from us to California, and 
we looked at him from afar. In four years he con- 
densed the work of forty. The very genius of or- 
ganization seemed to wait upon his steps. Men 
flocked to him as to a natural benefactor. As a 
clergyman, he built up the strongest church in the 
S.ate, with an income the largest of any in the land. 
&s a philanthropist, he raised for the most beneficent 



THOMAS STARR KING. 



265 



ot all charities the most munificent of all subscrip- 
tions. As a patriotic Christian statesman, he includ- 
ed the real elements of power in the community, 
took the people out of the hands of disloyal politi- 
cians, lifted them up to the level of his own ardent 
soul, and not only saved the State to the Union, but 
imprinted his own generous and magnanimous spirit 
on its forming life. In the full speed of this victo- 
rious career, with the blessings of a nation raining 
upon him, he was arrested by death, — the rich and 
abounding life suddenly summoned to the Source of 
Life, and " happy to go." Human willingness could 
hardly answer the Divine Will with more perfect 
submission ; and it is not for us, who remember with 
what a shock of inexpressible grief and pain that un- 
expected departure smote the hearts of kindred and 
friends, but who also remember how often from this 
pulpit, and from his lips, we have been taught -that 
the purpose of Providence in sending death is always 
beneficent, to doubt that the stroke, so heavy to us, 
so " happy " to him, was prompted by wisdom and 
love. Bowing before that transcendent mystery, and 
not seeking to penetrate it, let us find consolation in 
the faith that this child of the light has been caught 
up into the Light Ineffable, — that this preacher of the 
religion of joy has entered into the joy of his Lord. 

12 



AGASSIZ.* 



NO thoughtful person can have watched the ten- 
dencies of scientific thinking, for the last twenty 
or thirty years, without being impressed with its bear- 
ings on Natural Theology and the Philosophy of the 
Mind. A large class of scientific men, eminent for 
their powers of observation and understanding, but 
deficient in the more subtile and profound elements 
of mind which mark the philosophic thinker, have 
undoubtedly evinced in their speculations a strong 
leaning to Materialism, in what may be considered 
its worst form, namely, the doctrine that organized 
beings owe their origin to merely physical agents. 
The intellectual defect of these savans is a seeming 
incapacity to comprehend, appreciate, and feel the 
necessity of the fertile idea of Cause. For this they 
substitute the abstraction of Law, without a distinct 
impression of the meaning of the term, for law im- 
plies a power that legislates. It is no cause, but 

* Essay on Classification, 1857. 



AGASSIZ. 



267 



only the mode in which a cause operates ; " not action, 
but a rule of action." The distinguishing character- 
istic of a mind of the second class is its content 
with that explanation of a problem which is one or 
two removes from its centre and heart. It has no 
fine, detecting sense of the real thing to be investi- 
gated, explained, or affirmed. Too sceptical to admit 
the validity of that mental instinct, that gravitation to 
the truth, which conducts to solid and intelligent be- 
lief, they are credulous enough in giving omnipotence 
to the lifeless notion of law, if by so doing they can 
escape from the living conception of cause. The in- 
troduction of the idea of God is to them not only a 
fallacy but an affront, and throws them into a state 
of intellectual irritation which is not favorable to the 
fair consideration of the facts and arguments which 
make such an introduction necessary. 

But the defect is not merely intellectual. " It is 
also personal, and has one of its roots in the most 
refined form of vanity and pride. Everybody is 
familiar with the subjectivity and self-assertion of 
poets. We are not surprised when Dante makes 
himself the lord of the next world, and plunges his 
enemies into hell, with the full faith that there can 
be no disagreement between the Deity and himself 
as to their guilt or mode of punishment. We are 



268 



AGASSIZ. 



not surprised when Byron colors all nature with the 
hues of his own spirit, forces natural objects into 
symbols of his own caprices of disgust or desperation, 
and views mankind ■ as limited to Byron-kind. But 
we are hardly prepared to suspect that men engaged 
in a scientific scrutiny of material existences ever 
project their own nature on what they observe, or 
are tempted to make their own minds the measure 
of things. Yet this is, in many cases, the truth. A 
clear objective perception of facts, and the laws and 
principles which inhere in facts, is a moral, no less 
than a mental quality. It implies a purification of 
the character from egotism and pride of opinion, a 
rare union of humility of feeling with audacity of 
thought, and, above all, the triumph of a sincere love 
of objective truth over the desire to exalt a subjec- 
tive self. The moment a scientific man begins to 
bluster about his discoveries, and call them " my 
truth," it is all over with him. He has given 
pledges to the strongest of all selfish principles that 
he will see Nature hereafter only as Nature squares 
with his theory, and feeds his self-importance. Es- 
pecially, if he calls his notion Law, and makes law 
an ultimate, beyond which the human reason cannot 
go, he feels as if he were the creator of that which 
he has, perhaps, only imperfectly observed. In his 



AGASSIZ. 



269 



sage opinion it is the folly of superstition to admit 
the necessity of God, but he sees no impropriety 
in the apotheosis of his darling notion ; and, accord- 
ingly, he quietly expels God from the universe, and 
puts himself in His place. He does it as unmistak- 
ably, though not as coarsely and obviously, as the 
religious fanatic, who projects a deity from his malig- 
nant passions, and then insists on his being worshipped 
by all mankind. The temptation to substitute self 
— either in its emotional, or imaginative, or reason- 
ing expression — for objective truth is a temptation 
which is not confined to any one class of powerful 
natures, but operates on all ; and men of science 
have their full share of the infirmity.- 

"We have been led into these remarks by reading 
the long introductory Essay on Classification, in the 
first volume of Mr. Agassiz's " Contributions to the 
Natural History of North America" — a work of 
the first importance, if we merely consider its posi- 
tive additions to our knowledge of Natural History; 
but especially interesting to us for the felicity and 
power with which it deals with the higher philoso- 
phy of the science, and the superiority of the author 
to the besetting mental sins we have indicated. In 
the " Essay on Classification," the first of living nat- 
uralists proves himself also to be among the first of 



270 



AGASSIZ. 



living thinkers in the department of natural theology. 
Its publication we cannot but think to be no mere 
incident in the progress of science, but an event. 
It would seem to impose on every naturalist the 
duty of agreeing with Mr. Agassiz or of refuting 
him. No man of any scientific reputation can here- 
after bring forward the development theory, or the 
theory that animal life can be produced by the nat- 
ural operation of physical agents, or the theory that 
God is an obsolete idea in science, or the theory 
that things were not created but occurred, without 
harmonizing his theory with Mr. Agassiz's facts, and 
grappling with Mr. Agassiz's ideas. The essay will 
also do much to correct the anarchy of thought 
which prevails among many naturalists, who, being 
observers rather than thinkers, have confused notions 
of the real problems to be decided, are sometimes 
on one side of an important question, sometimes on 
another, with an imperfect comprehension of the vital 
points at issue; and who need nothing so much as 
the assistance of a master-mind, to draw a definite 
line between the two opposing systems, and to indi- 
cate the consequences of each. 

There can be no doubt of the right of Mr. Agas- 
siz to speak with authority on the philosophy of his 
science; for he has fairly earned the right to speak 



AGASSIZ. 



271 



by labor, by study, by the most extensive investiga- 
tions, by patient and continuous thought. The whole 
immense subject of natural history, in itself and in 
its literature, is reflected in the clear and compre- 
hensive mirror of his mind. He knows facts, and 
the relations of facts, so thoroughly, that he can 
wield them with ease as elements of the profoundest 
philosophical reasoning. The breadth of his view 
preserves him from the vice of detaching classes of 
facts from their relations, emphasizing them into 
undue importance, and severing the fine cord of 
connection which gives them their real significance. 
By the instinct of his intelligence he looks at every- 
thing, not as isolated, but as related, and consequent- 
ly he is not content with facts, but searches for the 
principles which give coherence to facts. As an ob- 
server, he is both rapid and accurate. He possesses 
not merely the talent of observation, but its genius ; 
and hence his ability to perform the enormous tasks 
which he imposes on his industry. His mind is 
eminently large, sound, fertile, conscientious, and sa- 
gacious, quick and deep in its insight, wide in the 
range of its argumentation, capable equally of the 
minutest microscopic scrutiny and the broadest gen- 
eralizations, independent of schools and systems, and 
inspired by that grand and ennobling love of truth 



272 



AGASSIZ. 



which is serenely superior to fear, interest, vanity, 
ambition, or the desire of display. In the operation 
of his mind there is no predominance of any single 
power, but the intellectual action of what we feel to 
be a powerful nature. When he observes, his whole 
mind enters into the act of observation, just as when 
he reasons, his whole mind enters into the act of 
reasoning. This unity of the man in each intellect- 
ual operation gives to his statements and arguments 
the character of depositions under oath. His personal 
honor is pledged for his accuracy, and his works are 
therefore free from those lies of the brain which 
spring from narrow thought, confused perceptions 
and hasty generalizations. Though in decided oppo- 
sition to many eminent naturalists, he, in common 
with all lovers of truth, has none of the fretful dis- 
putativeness of polemics ; and while he calmly and 
clearly controverts antagonistic theories, he exhibits 
nothing of the disputatious spirit. 

The " Essay on Classification," the reading of which 
has occasioned these general observations on the char- 
acteristics of Mr. Agassiz as a scientific thinker, is 
addressed to all minds that reflect, and not merely 
to the professed naturalist. In the general reader, its 
perusal will be likely to produce something of that 
wonder and awe which his first introduction to the 



AGASSIZ. 



273 



marvels of astronomy infused into his mind. And 
first, Mr. Agassiz takes the ground, that the divisions 
of the animal kingdom according to type, class, or- 
der, family, genus, and species are not convenient 
devices of the human understanding to classify its 
knowledge, but were instituted by God as the cate- 
gories of His thinking. There is a systematic ar- 
rangement in nature which science did not invent, 
but gradually discovered. The terms in which this 
arrangement is expressed are the translation into 
human language of the thoughts of the Creator. 
The plan of creation, so far from growing out of 
the necessary action of natural laws, betrays in ev- 
ery part, to the profound student, the signs of hav- 
ing been the free conception of the Divine Intellect, 
matured in His mind before it was manifested in 
external forms. The existence of a plan involves 
premeditation prior to the act which carried the plan 
into execution ; and if, through all the various stages 
of the physical history of the globe, this plan of an- 
imal creation has never been departed from, we are 
compelled to see in it the marks of thought and fore- 
thought, of intelligent purpose and unity of design. 
Now the researches of Cuvier, who classified animals 
according to their structure, and of Von Baer, who 
classified them according to their development, have 
12* B 



274 



AGASSIZ. 



shown that the animal kingdom exhibits four pri- 
mary divisions, the representatives of which are or- 
ganized upon four different plans of structure, and 
grow up according to four different modes of devel- 
opment. As regards living animals, at no period do 
the types pass into each other. The type of each 
animal is defined from the beginning, and controls 
the whole development. The embryo of the verte- 
brate is a vertebrate from the beginning, and does 
not exhibit at any time a correspondence with the 
invertebrates. In regard to extinct species the same 
principle holds good. Within thirty years it was cus- 
tomary for geologists and palaeontologists to assert 
that the lowest animals first made their appearance 
on the earth, and that these were followed by higher 
and higher types, until the series was closed by man. 
Now it is well known that representatives of the 
four types of animals existed simultaneously in the 
earliest geological periods. All naturalists now agree 
that there was no priority in time of the appearance 
of radiata, mollusks, and articulata ; and if some still 
contend that vertebrata originated later than the oth- 
ers, it is still conceded that they appeared before the 
end of the first great epoch in the history of the 
globe. It is curious how this great principle of type 
controls the animal kingdom. Many facts, at first 



AGASSIZ. 



275 



considered favorable to the notion that animal life 
was originated by the physical conditions and sur- 
roundings of its existence, have been turned against 
the theory by bringing in this fertile idea. Thus the 
blind fish in the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky has 
been cited as indicating that physical conditions de- 
termine the absence or presence of organs. But the 
discovery of a rudimentary eye in this fish proves 
that, in its creation, the plan of structure of the type 
to which it belongs was followed, though the organ 
was of no use. Indeed, the connection between or- 
gans and functions, which in most works on natural 
theology is emphasized as the great proof of causal 
and intelligent force, is not universally true. Organs 
without functions are among the ascertained facts of 
zoology. The whale has teeth which never cut 
through the gum. The males of mammalia have 
breasts which are never used. Pinnated animals 
have fingers which are never moved. Why is this? 
The reason is, that these organs, though not neces- 
sary to the mode of existence of the animals, are 
retained because they relate to the fundamental char- 
acteristics of their class. " The organ remains, not 
for the performance of a function, but with reference 
to a plan " ; as in architecture the same external 
combinations which mark the style to which a build- 



276 



AGASSIZ. 



ing belongs are often retained for the sake of sym- 
metry and harmony of proportion, when they servo 
no practical object. 

Now here is a great fact, true not only as regards 
living animals, but in respect to fossil species of for 
mer geological epochs, which carry the mind back 
into an incalculable remoteness of time, — the fact, 
namely, that all organized beings were made on four 
different plans of structure. These are types, ideas. 
The question is, Can we discriminate between these 
types and the classes in which the four plans of 
structure are carried out in actual organizations ? 
If we can thus discriminate, we of course lift the 
question out of matter into mind. We pass from 
organization to the Thought and Will that organ- 
ized. In all matters under human control we are 
accustomed to take this step. At whatever point we 
view a fact or event, we trace it back through all 
the stages of its progress to the invisible thought 
which contrived it, and the invisible will that bade, 
it be. We never hesitate, when we discern a plan 
carried practically out in human affairs, to give the 
plan a previous ideal existence in the mind of its 
human originator. If we should reason in practical 
affairs, as some naturalists reason in regard to the 
origin of organized beings, we should insist that no 



AGASSIZ. 



277 



one had the logical right to pass, beyond the steam- 
engine, which is a plan carried out, to the mind of 
James Watt, where it previously existed in idea. 

Now Mr. Agassiz has demonstrated that all ani- 
mals, both of living and extinct species, which have 
come under the notice of naturalists, exhibit the 
marks of these four plans of structure, and of no 
more, however infinitely diversified they may be in 
their details of structure. The number of existing 
species is at least two hundred and fifty thousand, 
with innumerable living representatives; and there is 
every reason to suppose that the number of extinct 
species is at least as great. Thus, from the begin- 
ning, through geological epochs which rival in time 
the marvels of astronomy in space, and under all the 
physical conditions and changes of the planet, we 
perceive four ideas controlling the structure of all 
organized beings. Leaving out of view the difficulty 
of supposing that physical elements should possess 
creative intelligence to originate animal life, we may 
still ask, without profanity, Where, in Heaven's name, 
did they get the memory ? In each epoch they 
would have been compelled to create anew, for the 
previous animals had left no living representative to 
hint the secret of their structure to the wild ele- 
mental philosophers who were called upon to extern 



4 



278 



AGASSIZ. 



porize animal life after the old plans. They would 
have been compelled to recollect the mode in which 
they did it in the elder time. What is this but a 
misuse of terms, — a wilful naming of one thing by 
the appellation of another, — a projection of qualities, 
characteristic of intelligent forces, upon forces which 
are unintelligent and necessitated? 

Mr. Agassiz therefore insists that these four plans 
of structure correspond to four ideas in the Creator's 
mind, which are independent of the animal forms in 
which they are carried out. It is impossible for us 
to condense the facts and arguments by which, in 
thirty-one weighty chapters, he proceeds to show that, 
from whatever point we survey animal life, we are 
inevitably led to a Supreme Personal Intelligence 
as its cause and support, — to an intelligence whose 
working in the animal creation exhibits " thought, 
considerate thought, combining power, premeditation, 
prescience, omniscience." Throughout this portion of 
his essay we continually feel the power and compre- 
hensiveness of his mind, both in the graceful ease 
with which an immense weight and affluence of 
knowledge is borne, and the vigorous felicity with 
which it is wielded in the service of ideas. There is 
no branch of his subject in which he does not show 
himself the master of his materials. The most con 



AGASSIZ. 



279 



fused facts fall into order and relation, and readily 
support principles they were at first supposed to 
deny, when subjected to the scrutiny of his penetrat- 
ing intelligence. His chapters on the simultaneous 
existence of the most diversified types under identi- 
cal circumstances ; on the repetition of identical types 
under the most diversified circumstances ; on the uni- 
ty of plan in otherwise highly diversified types; on 
the correspondence in the details of structure in ani- 
mals otherwise entirely disconnected ; on the various 
degrees and different kinds of relationship among ani- 
mals; on their gradation of structure; their range of 
geographical distribution ; on the serial connection in 
structure of those widely scattered on the globe's sur- 
face; on the relation between their size and struct- 
ure, and between their size and the mediums in 
which they live ; on the permanency of specific pe- 
culiarities in all organized beings ; and on their hab- 
its, metamorphoses, duration of life, succession, stand- 
ing, rank, and development : — these are all fertile in 
original thought and exact observation, and all swell 
the grand cumulative argument with which he rigor- 
ously connects organized beings with their Divine 
Source. It seems to us that he does not leave a 
loose or broken link in the whole chain of his rea- 
soning. 



280 



AGASSIZ. 



The second portion of his essay is devoted to a 
systematic description of the leading groups of ex- 
isting animals, as a foundation for a natural system 
of classification, and the third portion to an elaborate 
exposition and examination of the principal systems 
of zoology from Aristotle to Von Baer. His defini- 
tions of the divisions of what he calls the natural 
system of classification are clear and exact. Branches 
or types are characterized by the plan of their struct- % 
ure ; classes, by the manner in which that plan is 
executed, as far as ways and means are concerned ; 
orders, by the degrees of complication of that struct- 
ure ; families, by their form, as far as determined by 
structure ; genera, by the details of the execution in 
special parts ; and species, by the relations of indi- 
viduals to one another, and to the world in which 
they live, as well as by the proportion of their parts, 
their ornamentation, etc. All other divisions are but 
limitations of these. The representatives of these 
divisions are perishable individuals. If we select a 
living animal, we find that it has in its structure all 
the marks by which we assign it, not only to a cer- 
tain species and genus, but to an order, family, class, 
and type ; and this classification is not arbitrary, a 
human device for simplifying our knowledge, but the 
detection in the object itself of peculiarities divinely 



AGASSIZ. 



281 



impressed on its structure. Thus in the animal king- 
dom, God himself has combined unity and simplicity 
with the vastest diversity ; and the study of Natural 
History is not merely the contemplation of His works, 
but of His ideas and method, — a study, therefore, in 
which the spirit of meekness and awe can be united 
with a depth, force, daring, and amplitude of thought, 
compared with which the speculations of the selfish 
and sceptical school of natural philosophers appear 
feeble, and petty, and pert. The greatness of a 
philosopher is to be measured by what he suggests 
and aims after, as well as by what he discovers, 
and he never seems so great as when he uses his 
powers in attempting to follow the indications in na- 
ture of a Creative Intelligence infinitely greater than 
himself. 

In conclusion, we may say that Mr. Agassiz's 
processes and results are curiously contradictory of 
the dictum of that self-chosen legislator of science, 
Auguste Comte. We have been assured, over and 
over again, by the champions of the Philosophie Posi- 
tive, that Comte's law of the evolution of scientific 
thought is incontrovertible. Every branch of knowl- 
edge, according to this law, passes through three 
stages ; first, the theological or supernatural, in which 
phenomena are referred to supernatural agents as 



282 



AGASSIZ. 



their causes, the principle being the same whether 
the divine source of things is sought in fetichism 
or theism ; second, the metaphysical, or transitional 
stage, in which a passage is made from divine per- 
sons to personified abstractions, which are supposed 
to underlie, animate, and produce phenomena; and as 
the highest conception of the supernatural stage is 
God considered as cause, so the highest conception 
of the metaphysical stage is Nature, considered as 
force ; third, the positive stage, in which all inquiry 
after causes and essences is discarded, God and Na- 
ture are expelled from phenomena, and things are 
classified according to their invariable relations of 
succession and similitude. The hope of the positivist 
is, that the various laws with which he now contents 
his understanding will, in the progress and perfection 
of science, be found to be the expression of one 
general and all-inclusive Law. There are, therefore, 
three modes of viewing facts and relations: the first, 
which represents the infancy of a science, regards 
God as the Creator, the second regards Nature as 
the soul, and the third regards Law as the regulator, 
of phenomena. The highest conception of the posi- 
tivist, if individualized, would represent the universe 
under the care of a colossal, yet impersonal police- 
man, whose business was to preserve order. At 



AGASSIZ. 283 

present, the positivist admits that he has only seen 
some of the inferior police, but he thinks the glori- 
ous hope may be not unreasonably indulged that, 
ages after he is rotten, humanity will catch a glimpse 
of the master constable himself. By the limitation 
of the human faculties it is impossible for him to 
pass to any other orders of government. If he keeps 
within the circle of the knowable, he stops at the 
constable ; to superstition and metaphysics belong the 
absurdity of asserting that the constable is not ulti- 
mate, but implies a governor and a sovereign! 

Now, in the " Essay on Classification," Mr. Agassiz 
has certainly indicated his right to be ranked with 
positive philosophers as far as the observation, dis- 
covery, and verification of laws is concerned. He is 
true throughout to facts and the relations of facts, to 
those " invariable relations of succession and simili- 
tude " which the objects of his science bear tQ each 
other. He reaches positive conclusions, which there 
is every probability that future additions to natural 
history will confirm. He knows everything which 
the positivists of zoology — positivists after the idea 
of Comte — have observed and demonstrated. He has 
taken the science as. left by them, and carried it for- 
ward ; and both as an anatomist and embryologist, as 
an observer of the structure of animals and as an 



284 



AGASSIZ. 



observer of their development, he has put on immov 
able foundations the great law that all animals are 
organized upon four different plans of structure, and 
grow up according to four different modes of devel- 
opment. He has corrected the errors, in matters of 
fact, of many naturalists of Comte's method of think- 
ing, who, while they are never weary of stigmatizing 
the influence of theological and metaphysical theories 
in corrupting science, have themselves unconsciously 
misread facts by viewing them in the light of mislead- 
ing theories. And after showing, as Mr. Agassiz has 
done, that the various divisions of the system of classi- 
fication he espouses exist in nature, are independent of 
the human mind, and are confirmed by observation 
and experiment, it will not do to say that the science 
of zoology itself is not yet in the positive stage. 
How, then, are we to account for the fact that Mr. 
Agassiz reverses the " inevitable " evolution of scien- 
tific thought ? How shall we explain the problem 
that he passes from the positive stage to the super- 
natural, instead of to the positive from the supernat- 
ural ? It may be hinted — and tolerance and charity 
are not always accompaniments of scientific infidelity 
— that he does it in deference to popular prejudice, 
and not in obedience to the evidence of objective 
truth. This insinuation deserves to be considered 
6omewhat at length. 



AGASSIZ. 



285 



And first, we admit the paramount importance, in 
the investigation of the facts of creation, of that in- 
dependence of thought which is based on courageous 
character. Cowardice paralyzes the noblest powers ; 
and we own to an instinctive sympathy with every 
man who, in stating the conscientious results of 
thought and research, is honored with a howl of 
execration from that large body of persons who sup- 
pose that religion is only safe when it is under the 
guardianship of ignorance and unreason. But we do 
not think that the fear of rousing theological preju- 
dice is the kind of fear that a man of science is 
now in most danger of regarding. He is more 
tempted to yield to that refined form of cowardice 
which makes him apprehensive of offending the prej- 
udices of his order. A theological leaning in his 
scientific speculations is likely to expose him to the 
suspicious of his peers in science, and withdraw from 
him the signs of that subtle freemasonry by which 
leading minds recognize each other. In France, 
where eminence in the physical and mathematical 
sciences is the measure of intellectual ability, there is 
a strong scientific prejudice against associating nat- 
ural science with natural theology ; and France has 
done much to give the tone to the scientific world, 
It would be horrible, if it were not comical, to no* 



286 



AGASSIZ. 



tice the gravity with which the savans of the great 
nation have withdrawn their patronage from the 
Deity. Even Cousin, in his metaphysical opposition 
to the materialistic tendencies of French thought, 
excogitates a Deity who is rather a fine effect of 
philosophic rhetoric than an object of worship ; and 
he treats Christianity as a man of charming manners 
would treat a pretty child, making philosophy most 
condescendingly hold out its hand to her ! In the 
middle of the last century the very valets of the 
French men of science considered belief in God the 
mark of a vulgar mind. Infidelity was prattled by 
fops just as superstition was prattled by devotees. 
Free and liberal minds, so called, became members 
of an intellectual aristocracy, of which atheism, bla- 
tant or latent, was the condition of admittance. At 
present God is not so much denied as ignored. 
French science professes to get along very well 
without him. Religion, as far as it pretends to 
intellectual supports, is regarded as a sign of weak- 
ness, hypocrisy, or fear ; and the fear of being 
thought a coward operates to scare many natural 
philosophers into something very like cowardice. To 
avoid the .imputation of superstition, they often hesi- 
tate to follow the natural action of their understand- 
ings. We therefore consider that Mr. Agassiz, as 



AGASSIZ. 



287 



far as respects the public opinion of the scientific 
world, — which is the public opinion to which he 
naturally pays most heed, — will rather lose caste 
than gain fame among scientific naturalists by insist- 
ing so strenuously as he does on the theological as- 
pects of his science. Especially will he be made the 
object of ridicule for his belief in the interference of 
God, as Creator, in each geological epoch, — a doc- 
trine which will be considered by many as equiva- 
lent to introducing miracles into science, and as 
carrying it back to the most besotted supernatural 
stage of knowledge. 

We think, therefore, that Mr. Agassiz overcame a 
temptation, rather than yielded to one, when he 
broke through the technical limitations of his science, 
and passed from laws to ideas, and from ideas to 
God. But we have stronger proof that no desire 
to propitiate popular prejudices induced him -to run 
the risk of offending scientific prejudices, in the 
qualities of character impressed on his work itself. 
The task of criticism is not merely to apply laws, 
but discern natures ; and certainly Mr. Agassiz, in 
the " Essay on Classification," has exhibited himself 
as clearly as he has exhibited his subject. An hon- 
est, sturdy, generous, self-renouncing love of truth, 
and willingness to follow whithersoever it leads, — to 



288 



AGASSIZ. 



atheism, if the facts force him that way, to theism, 
if the facts conduct him to God, — this is the char- 
acteristic which his broad and open nature has 
stamped unmistakably on his page. Every sentence 
speaks scorn of intellectual reserves, and innocence 
of intellectual guile. And it is this truthful spirit 
animating his labors which gives to his results no 
small portion of their value and significance ; for 
falseness in the character is likely in the end to 
become falseness in the intellect ; and a thinker on 
the great themes which interest all mankind is 
shorn of his influence if his qualities of disposition 
are such as to cast doubts on his mental honesty, 
and to put his readers continually on their guard 
against observations he is supposed capable of mak- 
ing wilfully inaccurate, and reasonings he is sup- 
posed capable of making wilfully fallacious. 

In his "Essay on Classification," Mr. Agassiz states 
his scientific convictions. But he is not merely a 
scientific thinker : he is a scientific force ; and no 
small portion of the immense influence he exerts is 
due to the energy, intensity, and geniality which 
distinguish the nature of the man. In personal in- 
tercourse he inspires as well as informs, communi- 
cates not only knowledge, but the love of knowl- 
edge, and makes for the time everything appear of 



AGASSIZ. 



small account in comparison with the subject whid. 
has possession of his soul. To hear him speak oc 
Lis favorite themes is to become inflamed with his 
enthusiasm. He is at once one of the most domi- 
nating and one of the most sympathetic of men, 
having the qualities of leader and companion com- 
bined in singular harmony. People follow him, work 
for him, contribute money for his objects, not only 
from the love inspired by his good fellowship, but 
from the compulsion exercised by his force. Di- 
vorced from his geniality, his energy would make 
him disliked as a dictator; divorced from his energy, 
his geniality would be barren of practical effects. 
The good-will he inspires in others quickens theii 
active faculties as well as their benevolent feelings. 
They feel that, magnetized by the man, they must 
do something for the science impersonated in the 
man, — that there is no way of enjoying his compan- 
ionship without catching the contagion of his spirit. 
He consequently wields, through his social qualities, 
a wider personal influence over a wider variety of 
persons than any other scientific man of his time. 
At his genial instigation, laborers delve and dive, 
students toil for specimens, merchants open their 
purses, legislatures pass appropriation bills. To do 
something for Agassiz is a pleasing addition to the 

13 S 



290 



AGASSIZ. 



Whole Duty of Man in the region where he Jives. 
Everybody feels that the indefatigable observer and 
thinker, who declined a lucrative lecture invitation 
because, he said, he could not waste his time in 
making money, has no other than public ends in 
his eager demands for public co-operation in his 
scientific schemes. A perfect democrat in his man- 
ners, meeting every man on the level of his posi- 
tion and character, he is the equal and companion 
of all, and inundates all with his abounding personal 
vitality and cheer. At times the intensity of his 
temperament may rise to something like irascibility 
in the championship of his settled convictions; but 
this is felt to be a necessary consequence of that 
identification of the man with his pursuit which is 
the spring of his tireless energy and of his all-sacri- 
ficing devotion to the advancement of his science. 
Even his vehemence partakes of the largeness, gen- 
erosity, and geniality of his nature, — is the "noble 
rage" of a capacious yet ardent intelligence, momen- 
tarily carried away by that hatred of error which is 
the negative form of the love of truth. 

This wide geniality is not, in Agassiz, confined to 
his own race, but extends to the objects of his sci- 
ence. He considers all organized beings as endowed 
with minds ; and as a dramatic poet passes, by imagi- 



AGASSIZ. 



291 



nation and sympathy, into individual natures differ- 
ing from his own, thinking from the point of view 
of Bottom as easily as from the point of view of 
Hamlet, so Agassiz, passing the bounds even of his 
own kind, has a sort of interpretative glance into 
the mental and moral constitution of animals, as well 
as a scientific perception of their structure. He 
seems at times to have established spiritual commu- 
nication with them, so deeply and sympathetically he 
comprehends their natures and needs ; and it • might 
be said that they appear to have a dim perception 
of his good intentions towards their order, even when 
he is compelled to sacrifice individuals among them 
for the good of the science by which they are enno- 
bled. We never hear of his being injured by any 
of the creatures he captures and dissects. By a fan- 
ciful exaggeration, we might even suppose that the 
martyrs of his zoological researches, the patriots of 
the Animal Kingdom, the Leonidases and Hofers 
of natural history, had a consciousness that they 
were immolated for the benefit of their species ; that 
their death was the price by which the welfare of 
their race was to be assured; that Agassiz, their in- 
terpreter, who introduced them to the higher human 
order of beings, had the dignity and permanent inter- 
ests of their kind at heart jsven when he killed; and 



292 



AGASSIZ. 



that in his hands they became illustrations and proofs 
of a vast scheme of creation, visible links in a chain 
of reasoning which, beginning with the structure of 
the lowest form of animal life, has no other intelli* 
gent end than in the ideas of God. 



xn. 



WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES OF 
THE REVOLUTION* 

THE day, gentlemen, we have here met to com- 
memorate, in the spirit of a somewhat soberer 
joy than rings in the noisy jubilee of the streets, is 
not so much a day dedicated to liberty in the ab- 
stract, as a day especially consecrated to American 
liberty and American independence. The true char- 
acter of that liberty is to be sought in the events of 
our Colonial history, in the manners and laws of our 
Colonial forefathers, and, above all, in the stern, brief 
epitome of our whole Colonial life contained in that 
memorable Declaration, the maxims of whose ^sturdy 
wisdom still sound in our ears and linger in our 
hearts, as we have heard them read in this hall to- 
day; a Declaration peculiar among all others of its 
kind, not merely for the fearless free spirit which 
beats and burns beneath every decisive sentence, but 
for its combination of clearness in the statement of 

* An Oration delivered before the municipal authorities of Bos- 
ton, July 4, 1850. 



294 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES 

particular grievances with audacity in the announce- 
ment of general principles ; a Declaration, indeed, 
abounding in sentiments of liberty so sinewy and 
bold, and ideas of liberty so exact and practical, that 
it bears on every immortal feature the signs of rep- 
resenting a people, to whom liberty had been long 
familiar as a living law, as an organized institution, 
as a homely, household fact. The peculiarities which 
distinguish the whole substance and tone of this sol- 
emn instrument are peculiarities of the American 
Revolution itself, giving dignity to its events and 
import to its principles, as they gave success to its 
arms. 

Liberty, considered as an element of human na- 
ture, would naturally, if unchecked, follow an ideal 
law of development, appearing first as a dim but 
potent sentiment; then as an intelligent sentiment, or 
idea ; then as an organized idea, or body of institu- 
tions, recognizing mutual rights and enforcing mutual 
duties. But, in its historical development, we find 
that the unselfish nature of liberty is strangely inter- 
mixed with its selfish perversion ; that, in struggling 
writh outward oppression, it develops inward hatreds ; 
that the sentiment is apt to fester into a malignant 
passion, the idea to dwindle into a barren opinion, 
and this passionate opinion to issue in anarchy, which 



OF THE REVOLUTION. 295 

is despotism disorganized, but as tyrannical under its 
thousand wills as under its one. These hostile ele- 
ments, which make up the complex historical fact of 
liberty, — one positive, the other negative, — one or- 
ganizing, the other destructive, — are always at work 
in human affairs with beneficent or baleful energy ; 
but, as society advances, the baser elements give 
way by degrees to the nobler, and liberty ever tends 
to realize itself in law. The most genial operation 
of its creative spirit is when it appears as a still, 
mysterious, plastic influence, silently and surely mod- 
ifying the whole constitution of a despotic society, 
stealing noiselessly into manners, insinuating itself 
into the administration of laws, grafting new shoots 
upon* the decaying trunks of old institutions, and in- 
sensibly building up in a people's mind a character 
strong enough to maintain rights which are also cus- 
toms. If its most beneficent influence be seen^in its 
gradual organization of liberties, of sentiments rooted 
in facts, its most barren effect for good is when it 
scatters abstract opinions of freedom, true to nothing 
existing in a people's practical life, and scorning all 
alliance with manners or compromise with fact. This 
is a fertile source of disorder, of revolts which end 
in massacres, of Ages of Reason which end in 
Reigns of Terror ; and perhaps the failure of most 



296 WASHINGTON AND THE PKINCIPLES 



of the European movements comes from their being 
either mad uprisings against the pressure of intolera- 
ble miseries, or fruitless strivings to establish abstract 
principles. Such principles, however excellent as 
propositions, can influence only a small minority of 
a nation, for a nation rises only in defence of rights 
which have been violated, not for rights which it 
has never exercised ; and abstract " liberty, equality, 
and fraternity," pushed by amiable sentimentalists 
like Lamartine, and Satanic sentimentalists like Le- 
dru Rollin, have found their fit result in the armed 
bureaucracy, now encamped in Paris, under the 
ironical nickname of " French Republic." 

Now, it was the peculiar felicity of our position, 
that free institutions were planted here at the origi- 
nal settlement of the country, — institutions which 
De Tocqueville considers founded on principles far 
in advance of the wisest political science of Europe 
at that day; and accordingly our Revolution began in 
the defence of rights which were customs, of ideas 
which were facts, of liberties which were laws; and 
these rights, ideas, and liberties, embodying as they 
did the common life and experience of the people, 
were truly considered a palpable property, an inal- 
ienable inheritance of freedom, which the Stamp Act, 
and the other measures of Colonial taxation, threat- 



OF THE REVOLUTION. 



297 



ened with confiscation. Parliament, therefore, ap- 
peared in America as a spoiler, making war upon 
the people it assumed to govern, and it thus stimu- 
lated and combined the opposition of all classes ; for 
a wrong cannot but be universally perceived when it 
is universally felt. By thus starting up in defence 
of the freedom they really possessed, the Colonies 
vastly increased it. In struggling against innovation, 
they " innovated " themselves into independence ; in 
battling against novelties, they wrought out into act- 
ual form the startling novelty of constitutional Amer- 
ican liberty. It was because they had exercised 
rights that they were such proficients in principles ; 
it was because they had known liberty as an institu- 
tion that they understood it as a science. 

Thus it was not so much the perception of ab- 
stract opinions, as the inspiration of positive institu- 
tions, which gave our forefathers the heart to brave, 
and the ability successfully to defy, the colossal 
power of England ; but it must be admitted that in 
its obnoxious colonial policy England had parted 
with her wisdom, and in parting with her wisdom 
had weakened her power ; falling, as Burke says, 
under the operation of that immutable law "which 
decrees vexation to violence, and poverty to rapine." 
The Engknd arrayed against us was not the Eng- 
13* 



298 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES 

land which, a few years before, its energies wielded 
by the lofty and impassioned genius of the elder 
Pitt, had smitten the power and humbled the pride 
of two great European monarchies, and spread it3 
fleets and armies, animated by one vehement soul, 
over three quarters of the globe. The administra- 
tions of the English government, from 1760 to the 
close of our Revolutionary war, were more or less 
directed by the intriguing incapacity of the king. 
George the Third is said to have possessed many 
private virtues, — and very private for a long time 
he kept them from his subjects, — but, as a monarch, 
he was without magnanimity in his sentiments or 
enlargement in his ideas ; prejudiced, uncultivated, 
bigoted, and perverse ; and his boasted morality and 
piety, when exercised in the sphere of government, 
partook of the narrowness of his mind and the ob- 
stinacy of his will ; his conscience being used to 
transmute his hatreds into duties, and his religious 
sentiment to sanctify his vindictive passions ; and as 
it was his ambition to rule an empire by the petty 
politics of a court, he preferred rather to have his 
folly flattered by parasites than his ignorance en- 
lightened by statesmen. Such a disposition in the 
king of a free country was incompatible with effi- 
ciency in the conduct of affairs, as it split parties 



OF THE REVOLUTION. 



299 



into factions, and made established principles yield to 
personal expedients. Bute, the king's first minister, 
after a short administration unexampled for corrup- 
tion and feebleness, gave way before a storm of pop- 
ular contempt and hatred. To him succeeded George 
Grenville, the originator of the Stamp Act, and the 
blundering promoter of American Independence. Gren- 
ville was a hard, sullen, dogmatic, penurious man of 
affairs, with a complete mastery of the details of 
parliamentary business, and threading with ease all 
the labyrinths of English law, but limited in his con- 
ceptions, fixed in his opinions, without any of that 
sagacity which reads results in their principles, and 
chiefly distinguished for a kind of sour honesty, not 
infrequently found in men of harsh tempers and 
technical intellects. It was soon discovered, that, 
though imperious enough to be a tyrant, he was not 
servile enough to be a tool; that the same domineer- 
ing temper which enabled him to push arbitrary 
measures in Parliament, made him put insolent ques- 
tions in the closet; and the king, in despair of a 
servant who could not tax America and persecute 
Wilkes, without at the same time insulting his mas- 
ter, dismissed him for the Marquis of Rockingham, 
the leader of the great Whig connection, and a sturdy 
friend of the Colonists both before the Revolution and 



\ 



300 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES 



during its progress. Under him the Stamp Act was 
repealed ; but his administration soon proved too lib- 
eral to satisfy the politicians who governed the un- 
derstanding of the king ; and the experiment was 
tried of a composite ministry, put together by Chat- 
ham, consisting of members selected from different 
factions, but without any principle of cohesion to 
unite them ; and the anarchy inherent in the arrange- 
ment became portentously apparent, when Chatham, 
driven by the gout into a state of nervous imbecility, 
left it to work out its mission of misrule, and its 
eccentric control was seized by the Chancellor of the 
Exchequer, the gay, false, dissipated, veering, presump- 
tuous, and unscrupulous Charles Townshend. This man 
was so brilliant and fascinating as an orator, that Wal- 
pole said of one of his speeches, that it was like hear- 
ing Garrick act extempore scenes from Congreve ; 
but he was without any guiding moral or political 
principles; and, boundlessly admired by the House 
of Commons and boundlessly craving its admiration, 
he seemed to act ever from the impulses of vanity, 
and speak ever from the inspiration of champagne. 
Grenville, smarting under his recent defeat, but still 
doggedly bent on having a revenue raised in Amer 
ica, missed no opportunity of goading this versatile 
political roue with his exasperating sarcasms, "You 



OF THE REVOLUTION. 



301 



are cowards," said he on one occasion, turning to the 
Treasury bench; "you are afraid of the Americans; 
you dare not tax America." Townshend, stung by 
this taunt, started passionately up from his seat, ex- 
claiming, " Fear ! cowards ! dare not tax America ! I 
do dare tax America!" and this boyish bravado ush- 
ered in the celebrated bill, which was to cost Eng- 
land thirteen colonies, add a hundred millions of 
pounds to her debt, and affix a stain on her public 
character. Townshend, by the grace of a putrid fever, 
was saved from witnessing the consequences of his 
vainglorious presumption ; and the direction of his 
policy eventually fell into the hands of Lord North, 
a good-natured, second-rate, jobbing statesman, equally 
destitute of lofty virtues and splendid vices, under 
whose administration the American war was com- 
menced and prosecuted. Of all the ministers of 
George the Third, North was the most esteemed by 
his sovereign ; for he had the tact to follow plans 
which originated in the king's unreasoning brain and 
wilful disposition, and yet to veil their weak injus- 
tice in a drapery of arguments furnished from his 
own more enlarged mind and easier temper. Chat- 
ham and Camden thundered against him in the 
Lords ; Burke and Fox raved and shouted states 
manship to him in the Commons, and screamed out 



302 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES 



the maxims of wisdom in ecstasies of invective ; but 
he, good-naturedly tolerant to political adversaries, 
blandly indifferent to popular execration, and sleeping 
quietly through whole hours of philippics hot with 
threats of impeachment, pursued his course of court- 
ordained folly with the serene composure of a Ulys- 
ses or a Somers. The war, as conducted by his 
ministry, was badly managed; but he had one wise 
thought which happily failed to become a fact. The 
command in America, on the breaking out of serious 
disturbances, was offered to Lord Clive ; but, fortu- 
nately for us, Clive, at about that time, concluded to 
commit suicide, and our rustic soldiery were thus 
saved from meeting in the field a general, who, in 
vigor of will and fertility of resource, was unequalled 
by any European commander who had appeared since 
the death of Marlborough. It may here be added, 
that Lord North's plans of conciliation were the 
amiabilities of tyranny and benignities of extortion. 
They bring to mind the little French fable, wherein 
a farmer convokes the tenants of his barn-yard, and 
with sweet solemnity says, " Dear animals, I have 
assembled you here to advise me what sauce I shall 
cook you with." " But," exclaims an insurrectionary 
chicken, " we don't want to be eaten at all ! " — to 
which the urbane chairman replies, "My child, you 
wander from the point ! " 



OF THE KEVOLUTION. 



303 



Such was the government whose policy and whose 
arms were directed against our rights and liberties 
during the Revolutionary war. As soon as the 
struggle began, it was obvious that England could 
hold dominion over no portion of the country, except 
what her armies occupied or wasted for the time ; 
and that the issue of the contest turned on the ques- 
tion as to which would first yield, — the obstinacy of 
the king or the fortitude of the Americans. It was 
plain that George the Third would never yield 
except under compulsion from the other forces of 
the English constitution ; that, as long as a corrupt 
House of Commons would vote supplies, he would 
prosecute the war, no matter what might be the ex- 
pense of blood and treasure to England, no matter 
what might be the infliction of misery upon America. 
Conquest was hopeless ; and Lord North, before the 
war was half concluded, was in favor of abandoning 
it; but all considerations of policy and humanity 
were lost upon the small mind and conscientiously 
malignant temper of the king. Indeed, the peculiar- 
ity of our struggle consisted in its being with an 
unwise ruler, who could not understand that war, 
waged after the objects for which it was declared 
have utterly failed, becomes mere rapine and mur- 
der ; and our energy and endurance were put to the 



304 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES 



terrible test, of bearing up against the king's armies, 
until the English nation, humbling its irritated pride, 
should be roused in our behalf, and break down the 
king's stubborn purpose. We all know, and may we 
never forget, that this resistance to tyrannical inno- 
vation was no fiery outbreak of popular passion, 
spending itself in two or three battles, and then sub- 
siding into gloomy apathy ; but a fixed and reason- 
able resolve, proof against corrupt and sophistical 
plans of conciliation, against defeats and massacres, 
against universal bankruptcy and commercial ruin, — 
a resolve, which the sight of burning villages, and 
cities turned into British camps, only maddened intc 
fiercer persistence, and which the slow consuming 
fever of an eight years' war, with its soul-sickening 
calamities and vicissitudes, could not weaken into 
submission. The history, so sad and so glorious, 
which chronicles the stern struggle in which our 

CO 

rights and liberties passed through the awful baptism 
of fire and blood, is eloquent with the deeds of many 
patriots, warriors, and statesmen ; but these all fall 
into relations to one prominent and commanding fig- 
ure, towering up above the whole group in unap- 
proachable majesty, whose exalted character, warm 
and bright with every public and private virtue, and 
vital with the essential spirit of wisdom, has burst 



OF THE REVOLUTION. 



305 



all sectional and national bounds, and made the 
name of Washington the property of all mankind. 

This illustrious man, at once the world's admira- 
tion and enigma, we are taught by a fine instinct to 
venerate, and by a wrong opinion to misjudge. The 
might of his character has taken strong hold upon 
the feelings of great masses of men ; but, in trans 
latino this universal sentiment into an intelligent 
form, the intellectual element of his wonderful nature 
is as much depressed as the moral element is ex- 
alted, and consequently we are apt to misundorotand 
both. Mediocrity has a bad trick of idealizing itself 
in eulogizing him, and drags him down to its own 
level while assuming to lift him to the skies. How 
many times have we been told that he was not a 
man of genius, but a person of " excellent common 
sense," of "admirable judgment," of "rare virtues"! 
and, by a constant repetition of this odious cant, we 
have nearly succeeded in divorcing comprehension 
from his sense, insight from his judgment, force from 
his virtues, and life from the man. Accordingly, in 
the panegyric of cold spirits, Washington disappears 
in a cloud of commonplaces ; in the rodomontade of 
boiling patriots, he expires in the agonies of rant. 
Now, the sooner this bundle of mediocre talents and 
moral qualities, which its contrivers have the au- 

T 



306 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES 



dacity to call George Washington, is hissed out of 
existence, the better it will be for the cause of talent 
and the cause of morals : contempt of that is the con- 
dition of insight. He had no genius, it seems. O 
no ! genius, we must suppose, is the peculiar and 
shining attribute of some orator, whose tongue can 
spout patriotic speeches, or some versifier, whose muse 
can " Hail Columbia," but not of the man w T ho sup- 
ported states on his arm, and carried America in his 
brain. The madcap Charles Townshend, the motion 
of whose pyrotechnic mind was like the whiz of a 
hundred rockets, is a man of genius ; but George 
Washington, raised up above the level of even emi- 
nent statesmen, and with a nature moving with the 
still and orderly celerity of a planet round the sun, 
— he dwindles, in comparison, into a kind of angelic 
dunce ! What is genius ? Is it worth anything ? Is 
splendid folly the measure of its inspiration? Is wis- 
dom that which it recedes from, or tends towards? 
And by what definition do you award the name to 
the creator of an epic, and deny it to the creator of 
a country ? On what principle is it to -be lavished 
on him who sculptures in perishing marble the im^ 
age of possible excellence, and withheld from him 
who built up in himself a transcendent character, 
indestructible as the obligations of Duty, and beauti 
ful as her rewards ? 



OP THE REVOLUTION. 



307 



Indeed, if by the genius of action you mean will 
enlightened by intelligence, and intelligence energized 
by will, — if force and insight be its characteristics, 
and influence its test, — and, especially, if great ef- 
fects suppose a cause proportionably great, that is, a 
vital causative mind, — then is Washington most as- 
suredly a man of genius, and one whom no other 
American has equalled in the power of working 
morally and mentally on other minds. His genius, 
it is true, was of a peculiar kind, the genius of char- 
acter, of thought and the objects of thought solidified 
and concentrated into active faculty. He belongs 
to that rare class of men, — rare as Homers and 
Miltons, rare as Platos and Newtons, — who have 
impressed their characters upon nations without pam- 
pering national vices. Such men have natures broad 
enough to include all the facts of a people's practical 
life, and deep enough to discern the spiritual laws 
which underlie, animate, and govern those facts. 
Washington, in short, had that greatness of charac- 
ter which is the highest expression and last result 
of greatness of mind ; for there is no method of 
building up character except through mind. Indeed, 
character like his is not built up, stone upon stone, 
precept upon precept, but grows up, through an act- 
ual contact of thought with things, — the assimilative 



308 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES 

mind transmuting the impalpable but patent spirit of 
public sentiment, and the life of visible facts, and the 
power of spiritual laws, into individual life and pow 
er, so that their mighty energies put on personality, 
as it were, and act through one centralizing human 
will. This process may not, if you please, make the 
great philosopher or the great poet; but it does make 
the great man, — the man in whom thought and judg- 
ment seem identical with volition, — the man whose 
vital expression is not in words, but deeds, — the 
man whose sublime ideas issue necessarily in sublime 
acts, not in sublime art. It was because Washing- 
ton's character was thus composed of the inmost sub- 
stance and power of facts and principles, that men 
instinctively felt the perfect reality of his comprehen- 
sive manhood. This reality enforced universal re- 
spect, married strength to repose, and threw into his 
face that commanding majesty, which made men of 
the speculative audacity of Jefferson, and the lucid 
genius of Hamilton, recognize, with unwonted meek- 
ness, his awful superiority. 

But, you may say, how does this account for Wash- 
ington's virtues ? Was his disinterestedness will ? Was 
his patriotism intelligence ? Was his morality genius ? 
These questions I should answer with an emphatic 
yes; for there are few falser fallacies than^that which 



OF THE REVOLUTION. 



309 



represents moral conduct as flowing from moral opin- 
ions detached from moral character. Why, there is 
hardly a tyrant, sycophant, demagogue, or liberticide 
mentioned in history, who had not enough moral 
opinions to suffice for a new Eden ; and Shakespeare, 
the sure-seeing poet of human nature, delights to put 
the most edifying maxims of ethics into the mouths 
of his greatest villains, of Angelo, of Richard the 
Third, of the uncle-father of Hamlet. Without doubt 
Caesar and Napoleon could have discoursed more flu- 
ently than Washington on patriotism, as there are a 
thousand French republicans, of the last hour's coin- 
age, who could prattle more eloquently than he on 
freedom. But Washington's morality was built up in 
warring with outward temptations and inward pas- 
sions, and every grace of his conscience was a trophy 
of toil and struggle. He had no moral opinions 
which hard experience and sturdy discipline had not 
vitalized into moral sentiments, and organized into 
moral powers; and these powers, fixed and seated in 
the inmost heart of his character, were mighty and 
far-sighted forces, which made his intelligence moral 
and his morality intelligent, and which no sorcery of 
the selfish passions could overcome or deceive. In 
the sublime metaphysics of the New Testament, his 
eye was single, and this made his whole body full of 



810 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES 



light. It is just here that so many other eminent 
men of action, who have been tried by strong temp- 
tations, have miserably failed. Blinded by pride, or 
whirled on by wrath, they have ceased to discern 
and regard the inexorable moral laws, obedience to 
which is the condition of all permanent success ; and, 
in the labyrinths of fraud and unrealities in which 
crime entangles ambition, the thousand-eyed genius 
of wilful error is smitten with folly and madness. 
No human intellect, however vast its compass and 
delicate its tact, can safely thread those terrible 
mazes. "Every heaven-stormer, ,, says a quaint Ger- 
man, " finds his hell, as sure as every mountain its 
valley." Let us not doubt the genius of Washington 
because it was identical with wisdom, and because 
its energies worked with, and not against, the spirit- 
ual order its " single eye " was gifted to divine. We 
commonly say that he acted in accordance with moral 
laws ; but we must recollect that moral laws are in- 
tellectual facts, and are known through intellectual 
processes. We commonly say that he was so consci- 
entious as ever to follow the path of right, and obey 
the voice of duty. But what is right but an abstract 
term for rights ? What is duty but an abstract term 
for duties ? Rights and duties move not in parallel 
but converging lines; and how, in the terror, discord, 



OP THE REVOLUTION. 



311 



and madness of a civil war, with rights and duties 
in confused conflict, can a man seize on the exact 
point where clashing rights harmonize, and where 
opposing duties are reconciled, and act vigorously on 
the conception, without having a conscience so in- 
formed with intelligence that his nature gravitates to 
the truth as by the very instinct and essence of 
reason ? 

The virtues of Washington, therefore, appear moral 
or mental according as we view them with the eye 
of conscience or reason. In him, loftiness did not 
exclude breadth, but resulted from it ; justice did not 
exclude wisdom, but grew out of it ; and, as the wis- 
est as well as justest man in America, he was pre- 
eminently distinguished among his contemporaries for 
moderation, — a word under which weak politicians 
conceal their want of courage, and knavish politicians 
their want of principle, but which in him was .vital 
and comprehensive energy, tempering audacity with 
prudence, self-reliance with modesty, austere princi- 
ples with merciful charities, inflexible purpose with 
serene courtesy, and issuing in that persistent and 
unconquerable fortitude, in which he excelled all 
mankind. In scrutinizing the events of his life to 
discover the processes by which his character grew 
gradually up to its amazing height, we are arrested 



312 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES 



at the beginning by the character of his mother, a 
woman temperate like him in the use of words, from 
her clear perception and vigorous grasp of things. 
There is a familiar anecdote recorded of her, which 
enables us to understand the simple sincerity and 
genuine heroism she early instilled into his strong 
and aspiring mind. At a time when his glory rang 
through Europe ; when excitable enthusiasts were 
crossing the Atlantic for the single purpose of seeing 
him ; when bad poets -all over the world were sack- 
ing the dictionaries for hyperboles of panegyric ; 
when the pedants of republicanism were calling him 
the American Cincinnatus and the American Fabius 
— as if our Washington were honored in playing the 
adjective to any Roman, however illustrious! — she, 
in her quiet dignity, simply said to the voluble 
friends who were striving to flatter her mother's 
'pride into an expression of exulting praise, "that he 
had been a good son, and she believed he had done 
his duty as a man." Under the care of a mother, 
who flooded common words with such a wealth of 
meaning, the boy was not likely to mistake medioc- 
rity for excellence, but would naturally domesticate 
in his heart lofry principles of conduct, and act from 
them as a matter of course, without expecting or ob- 
taining praise. The consequence was, that in earlv 



OF THE REVOLUTION. 313 

life, and in his first occupation as surveyor, and 
through the stirring events of the French war, he 
built up character day by day in a systematic en- 
durance of hardship ; in a constant sacrifice of incli- 
nations to duty ; in taming hot passions into the 
service of reason ; in assiduously learning from other 
minds; in wringing knowledge, which could not be 
taught him, from the reluctant grasp of a flinty ex- 
perience ; in completely mastering every subject on 
which he fastened his intellect, so that whatever he 
knew he knew perfectly and forever, transmuting it 
into mind, and sending it forth in acts. Intellectual 
and moral principles, which other men lazily contem- 
plate and talk about, he had learned through a pro- 
cess which gave them the toughness of muscle and 
bone. A man thus sound at the core and on the 
surface of his nature ; so full at once of integrity and 
sagacity ; speaking ever from the level of his charac- 
ter, and always ready to substantiate opinions with 
deeds ; — a man without any morbid egotism, or pre- 
tension, or extravagance ; simple, modest, dignified, 
incorruptible ; never giving advice which events did 
not indorse as wise, never lacking fortitude to bear 
calamities which resulted from his advice being over- 
ruled ; — such a man could not but exact that recog- 
nition of commanding genius which inspires universal 
14 



314 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES 



confidence. Accordingly, when the contest between 
the colonies and the mother country was assuming 
its inevitable form of civil war, he was found to be 
our natural leader in virtue of being the ablest man 
among a crowd of able men. When he appeared 
among the eloquent orators, the ingenious thinkers, 
the vehement patriots, of the Revolution, his modesty 
and temperate professions could not conceal his su- 
periority : he at once, by the very nature of great 
character, was felt to be their leader ; towered up, 
indeed, over all their heads as naturally as the foun- 
tain, sparkling yonder in this July sun, which, in its 
long, dark, downward journey, forgets not the altitude 
of its parent lake, and no sooner finds an outlet in 
our lower lands than it mounts, by an impatient in- 
stinct, surely up to the level of its far-off* inland 
source. 

After the first flush and fever of the Revolution- 
ary excitement were over, and the haggard fact of 
civil war was visible in all its horrors, it soon ap- 
peared how vitally important was such a character 
to the success of such a cause. We have already 
seen that the issue of the contest depended, not on 
the decision of this or that battle, not on the occu- 
pation of this or that city, but on the power of the 
colonists to wear out the patience, exhaust the re- 



OF THE REVOLUTION. 



315 



sources, and tame the pride of Great Britain. The 
king, when Lord North threatened, in 1778, to resign 
unless the war were discontinued, expressed his de- 
termination to lose his crown rather than acknowl- 
edge the independence of. the rebels; he was as much 
opposed to that acknowledgment in 1783 as 1778 ; 
And it was only by a pressure from without, and 
when the expenditures for the war had reached more 
than a hundred millions of pounds, that a reluctant 
consent was forced from that small, spiteful mind. 
Now, undoubtedly a vast majority of the American 
people were unalterably resolved on independence ; 
but they were spread through thirteen colonies, were 
not without mutual jealousies, and were represented 
in a Congress whose delegated powers were insuf- 
ficient to prosecute war with vigor. The problem 
was, how to combine the strength, allay the suspi- 
cions, and sustain the patriotism of the people,^ dur- 
ing a contest peculiarly calculated to distract and 
weaken their energies. Washington solved this prob- 
lem by the true geometry of indomitable personal 
character. He was the soul of the Revolution, felt 
at its centre, and felt through all its parts, as a 
uniting, organizing, animating power. Comprehensive 
as America itself, through him, and through him 
alone, could the strength of America act. He was 



316 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES 



security in defeat, cheer in despondency, light in 
darkness, hope in despair, — the one man in whom 
all could have confidence, — the one man whose sun- 
like integrity and capacity shot rays of light and 
heat through everything they shone upon. He would 
not stoop to thwart the machinations of envy; he 
would not stoop to contradict the fictions and for- 
geries of calumny; and he did not need to do it. 
Before the effortless might of his character, they 
stole away, and withered, and died; and through no 
instrumentality of his did their abject authors become 
immortal as the malign ers of Washington. 

To do justice to Washington's military career, we 
must consider that he had to fuse the hardest indi- 
vidual materials into a mass of national force, which 
was to do battle, not only with disciplined armies, 
but with frost, famine, and disease. Missing the 
rapid succession of brilliant engagements between 
forces almost equal, and the dramatic storm and 
swift consummation of events, which European cam- 
paigns have made familiar, there are those who see 
in him only a slow, sure, and patient commander, 
without readiness of combination or energy of move- 
ment. But the truth is, the quick eye of his pru- 
dent audacity seized occasions to deliver blows with 
the prompt felicity of Marlborough or Wellington 



OF THE REVOLUTION. 



817 



He evinced no lack of the highest energy and skill 
when he turned back the tide of defeat at Monmouth, 
or in the combinations which preceded the siege of 
Yorktown, or in the rapid and masterly movements 
by which, at a period when he was considered ut- 
terly ruined, he stooped suddenly down upon Tren- 
ton, broke up all the enemy's posts on the Delaware, 
and snatched Philadelphia from a superior and victo- 
rious foe. Again, some eulogists have caricatured 
him as a passionless, imperturbable, " proper " man ; 
but, at the battle of Monmouth, General Lee was 
privileged to discover, that from those firm, calm 
lips could leap words hotter and more smiting than 
the hot June sun that smote down upon their heads. 
Indeed, Washington's incessant and various activity 
answered to the strange complexity of his position, 
as the heart and brain of a Revolution, which 
demanded not merely generalship, but the highest 
qualities of the statesman, the diplomatist, and the 
patriot. As we view him in his long seven years' 
struggle with the perilous difficulties of his situation, 
his activity constantly entangled in a mesh of con- 
flicting considerations, — with his eye fixed on Con- 
gress, on the States, and on the people, as well 
as on the enemy, — compelled to compose sectional 
quarrels, to inspire faltering patriotism, and to tri- 



318 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES 



umph over all the forces of stupidity and selfishness, 
— compelled to watch, and wait, and warn, and for- 
bear, and endure, as well as to act, — compelled, 
amid vexations and calamities which might have 
stung the dullest sensibilities into madness, to trans- 
mute the fire of the fiercest passion into an element 
of fortitude; — and, especially, as we view him com- 
ing out of that terrible and obscure scene of trial 
and temptation, without any bitterness in his virtue, 
or hatred in his patriotism, but full of the loftiest 
wisdom and serenest power ; — as we view all this in 
the order of its history, that placid face grows grad- 
ually sublime, and in its immortal repose looks rebuke 
to our presumptuous eulogium of the genius whiel 
breathes through it! 

We all know that towards the end of the weary- 
ing struggle, and when his matchless moderation and 
invincible fortitude were about to be crowned witb 
the hallowing glory which Liberty piously reserver 
for her triumphant saints and martyrs, a committee 
of his officers proposed to make him king; and we 
sometimes do him the cruel injustice to say that his 
virtue overcame the temptation. He was not knave 
enough, or fool enough, to be tempted by such crim- 
inal baubles. What was his view of the proposal? 
He, who had never sought popularity, but whom 



OF THE REVOLUTION. 



319 



popularity had sought, — he, who had entered public 
life, not for the pleasure of exercising power, but for 
the satisfaction of performing duty, — he, to be in- 
sulted and outraged by such an estimate of his ser- 
vices, and such a conception of his character! — why, 
it could provoke in him nothing but an instantaneous 
burst of indignation and abhorrence ! — and, in his 
reply, you will find that these emotions strain the 
language of reproof beyond the stern courtesy of 
military decorum. 

The war ended, and our independence acknowl- 
edged, the time came when American liberty, threat- 
ened by anarchy, was to be reorganized in the 
Constitution of the United States. As President of 
the Convention which framed the Constitution, Wash- 
ington powerfully contributed to its acceptance by the 
States. The people were uncertain as to the equity 
of its compromise of opposing interests, and adjust- 
ment of cTashing claims. By this eloquent and 
learned man they were advised to adopt it ; by that 
eloquent and learned man they were advised to re- 
ject it; but there, at the end of the instrument itself, 
and first among many eminent and honored names, 
was the bold and honest signature of George Wash- 
ington, a signature which always carried with it the 
integrity and the influence of his character; and that 



320 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES 



was an argument stronger even than any furnished 
by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. The Constitution 
was accepted ; and Washington, whose fame, to use 
Allston's familiar metaphor, was ever the shadow 
cast by his excellence, was of course unanimously 
elected President. This is no place to set forth the 
glories of his civil career. It is sufficient to say, 
that, placed amid circumstances where ignorance, van- 
ity, or rashness would have worked ruinous mischief 
and disunion, he consolidated the government. One 
little record in his diary, just before he entered upon 
his office, is a key to the spirit of his administration. 
His journey from Mount Yernon to the seat of gov- 
ernment was a triumphal procession. At New York 
the air was alive with that tumult of popular ap- 
plause, which has poisoned the integrity by intox- 
icating the pride of so many eminent generals and 
statesmen. What was the feeling of Washington? 
Did he have a misanthrope's cynical contempt for 
the people's honest tribute of gratitude? Did he 
have a demagogue's fierce elation in being the object 
of the people's boundless admiration? No. His sen- 
sations, he tells us, were as painful as they were 
pleasing. His lofty and tranquil mind thought of the 
possible reverse of the scene after all his exertions 
to do good. The streaming flags, the loud acclama- 



OF THE REVOLUTION. 



321 



tions, the thunder of the cannon, and the shrill music 
piercing through all other sounds, — these sent his 
mind sadly forward to the solitude of his closet, 
where, with the tender and beautiful austerity of his 
character, he was perhaps to sacrifice the people's 
favor for the people's safety, and to employ every 
granted power of a Constitution he so perfectly un 
derstood, in preserving peace, in restraining faction, 
and in giving energy to all those constitutional re- 
straints on popular passions, by which the wisdom of 
to-morrow rules the recklessness of to-day. 

In reviewing a life thus passed in enduring hard- 
ship and confronting peril, fretted by constant cares 
and worn by incessant drudgery, we are at first sad- 
dened by the thought that such heroic virtue should 
have been purchased by the sacrifice of happiness. 
But we wrong Washington in bringing his enjoy- 
ments to the test of our low standards. He has 
everything for us to venerate, — nothing for our com- 
miseration. He tasted of that joy which springs from 
a sense of great responsibilities willingly incurred, 
and great duties magnanimously performed. To him 
was given the deep bliss of seeing the austere coun- 
tenance of inexorable Duty melt into approving 
smiles, and to him was realized the poet's rapturous 
vision of her celestial compensations : — 

U* u 



322 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES 



" Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear 
The Godhead's most benignant grace, 
Nor know we anything so fair 
As is the smile upon thy face." 

It has been truly said that "men of intemperate 

minds cannot be free ; their passions forge their fet- 

» 

ters " ; but no clank of any chain, whether of avarice 
or ambition, gave the least harshness to the move- 
ment of Washington's ample mind. In him America 
has produced at least one man, whose free soul was 
fit to be Liberty's chosen home. As was his indi- 
vidual freedom, so should be our national freedom. 
We have seen all along, that American liberty, in 
its sentiment and idea, is no opinionated, will-strong, 
untamable passion, bursting all bounds of moral re- 
straint, and hungering after anarchy and license, but 
a creative and beneficent energy, organizing itself in 
laws, professions, trades, arts, institutions. From its 
extreme practical character, however, it is liable to 
contract a taint which has long vitiated English free- 
dom. To the Anglo-Saxon mind, Liberty is not apt 
to be the enthusiast's mountain nymph, wiih cheeks 
wet with morning dew and clear eyes that mirror 
the heavens, but rather is she an old dowager lady, 
fatly invested in commerce and manufactures, and 
peevishly fearful that enthusiasm will reduce her es- 



OF THE REVOLUTION. 323 

tablishment, and panics cut off her dividends. Now 
the moment property becomes timid, agrarianism be- 
comes bold ; and the industry which liberty has cre- 
ated, liberty must animate, or it will be plundered 
by the impudent and rapacious idleness its slavish 
fears incite. Our political institutions, again, are but 
the body of which liberty is the soul ; their preser- 
vation depends on their being continually inspired by 
the light and heat of the sentiment and idea whence 
they sprung ; and when we timorously suspend, ac- 
cording to the latest political fashion, the truest and 
dearest maxims of our freedom at the call of expe- 
diency or the threat of passion, — when we convert 
politics into a mere game of interests, unhallowed by 
a single great and unselfish principle, — we may be 
sure that our worst passions are busy " forging our 
fetters"; that we are proposing all those intricate 
problems which red republicanism so swiftly solves, 
and giving Manifest Destiny pertinent hints to shout 
new anthems of atheism over victorious rapine. The 
liberty which our fathers planted, and for which they 
sturdily contended, and under which they grandly 
conquered, is a rational and temperate, but brave 
and unyielding freedom, the august mother of insti- 
tutions, the hardy nurse of enterprise, the sworn ally 
of justice and order; a Liberty that lifts her awful 



324 WASHINGTON AND THE REVOLUTION. 



and rebuking face equally upon the cowards who 
would sell, and the braggarts who would pervert, her 
precious gifts of rights and obligations; and this lib- 
erty we are solemnly bound at all hazards to pro- 
tect, at any sacrifice to preserve, and by all just 
means to extend, against the unbridled excesses of 
that ugly and brazen hag, originally scorned and de- 
tested by those who unwisely gave her infancy a 
home, but who now, in her enormous growth and 
favored deformity, reels with bloodshot eyes, and di- 
shevelled tresses, and words of unshamed slavishness, 
into halls where Liberty should sit throned! 



THE END. 



Cambridge : Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co. 



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